Apple Music
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LATEST ARTICLES - PAGE 6

Apple Music Removing “Connect”

Jason Tate

Zac Hall, writing for 9to5Mac:

Apple has started notifying Apple Music artists that it is removing the ability for artists to post content to Apple Music Connect, and previously posted Apple Music Connect content is being removed from the For You section and Artist Pages in Apple Music. Connect content will still be viewable through search results on Apple Music, but Apple is removing artist-submitted Connect posts from search in May.

I miss Rdio and I miss their “heavy rotation” feed. That was the right way to integration social features into a music streaming service.

Apple Music for Business (Restaurants, Bars, Stores, etc.)

Jason Tate

Patently Apple:

There’s a common misunderstanding among business owners that songwriters are only compensated by the purchase of their CDs, so that a business owner can freely play copyrighted music for customers. Not so, and Apple’s new trademark filing for ‘Apple Music for Business’ indicates that Apple will be entering this new business avenue for Apple music in the future as the company seeks to expand their services businesses.

Interesting.

Visualize Your Apple Music History

Jason Tate

Chance Miller, writing at 9to5Mac:

Murray’s tool shows your most listened to song on Apple Music since Apple Music launched in 2015, as well as the songs you listened to most each year. You can also see the total amount of time you’ve spent listening to Apple Music, the day you spent the most time playing music, and much more. Privacy is of course a concern here, but Murray promises that no data ever leaves your computer and all computation is done in the browser.

These are the kinds of things Apple Music should build into the product. At the end of the year I always create a bunch of Smart Playlists to give me information like this, but having it all in one place, and updated automatically, would be so much better.

Apple Music Coming to Amazon Echo on December 17th

amazon
Jason Tate

Amazon:

Apple Music subscribers will be able to enjoy Apple Music’s 50 million songs on Echo devices. Customers will be able to ask Alexa to play their favorite songs, artists, and albums — or any of the playlists made by Apple Music’s editors from around the world, covering many activities and moods. […] Simply enable the Apple Music skill in the Alexa app and link your account to start listening.

I’m more excited about this than I thought I’d be.

Genius Teams Up With Apple Music

Jason Tate

Genius will be providing lyrics to Apple Music:

Genius has the world’s best lyrics database and now it’s available on Apple Music. Genius will provide lyrics to thousands of hit songs on the service—bringing world-class accuracy and timeliness powered by Genius’s global community of artists and fans.

Apple Music Gains Better Album Organization

Jason Tate

Federico Viticci, writing for MacStories:

While the old artist page design of Apple Music mixed albums, singles, EPs, live albums, and more under the same ‘Albums’ section, the new Apple Music features separate sections for different types of music releases. The new sections include singles and EPs, live albums, essential albums recommended by Apple Music editors, compilations, and appearances by an artist on other albums. As pictured above, Apple Music now also highlights an artist’s latest or upcoming release at the top of the page.

Much better.

Apple Music to Publish Its Own Top Music Charts

Jason Tate

Rolling Stone:

Apple Music, in a software update Friday to all users, is rolling out 116 “top 100” numeric charts, which will display the top-streamed songs on Apple Music refreshed on a regular basis. In a demo to Rolling Stone, Apple Music executives showed how the charts — one global chart and a top 100 chart for every country in which Apple Music is available — are grouped together under the platform’s “Browse” tab and have a similar visual appearance to that of playlists or albums. Each chart is updated daily at 12 a.m. PST.

The global chart can be found here.

Apple Music Launches “Friends Mix”

Jason Tate

Apple Music has launched a new “Friends Mix” that will give you a list of 25 songs each week based on the listening habits of people you follow on the service. You can find this in the “For You” section of Apple Music. My “Friends Mix” looks basically exactly like you’d expect.

If you want my spins showing up in your mix, feel free to follow me here. It’s been a lot of punk music lately.

Apple Music Rolling Out Update With ‘Coming Soon’ Section

Jason Tate

Mitchel Broussard, writing at MacRumors:

Apple appears to be rolling out a series of updates for Apple Music today, including a small but useful new section called “Coming Soon,” which allows subscribers to check out new albums about to be released over the next few weeks. […] In another addition, Apple is now making it possible to easily see album launch dates on their respective pages on iOS and macOS. In the Editors’ Notes section, following the traditional encouragement to add the pre-release album to your library, there’s a new line that begins “Album expected…” followed by the album’s specific release date.

Some nice updates, but what I really want is one feed/section that simply gives me a chronological listing of newly released albums from people already in my collection. On Friday morning I should be able to look one place and see all the new albums from people Apple Music already knows I like and listen to. I’m cool with a smaller scattering of recommendations for new music I may like under that main list as well, but finding the newly released albums from artists I already love should be easy. Half the time I’ll forget I pre-added an album that’s out today and this kind of reminder would be great. Hell, so many of my friends don’t even know their favorite band released new music over the past five years. This is a solvable problem.

Update: I was just looking around in the new Apple Music, and I don’t know if this is new or not, but if you go to the “For You” section and scroll to the very bottom, there’s a “New Releases” section. Clicking “See All” seems pretty close to what I’m talking about. However, it’s definitely missing things from artists in my collection with new albums. For example, that Lykke Li album released today isn’t in my listing even though all of her albums are in my library.

Apple Music and Pandora No Longer Promoting R. Kelly

Jason Tate

Apple Music and Pandora have also stopped promoting R. Kelly on their platforms:

Now, a source close to the matter tells Pitchfork that Apple Music also begun to stop promoting R. Kelly in featured playlists over the past several weeks. The decision was made quietly, and it pre-dates Spotify’s announcement. Kelly’s music has been pulled from Apple Music-curated playlists such as “Best Slow Jams of the 90s, Vol. 1” and Vol. 2. (Kelly is prominently featured in the artwork for the playlists, but his music is no longer in them.)

I want a “block artist” button on Apple Music (and Spotify). Something that I can click to keep an artist from ever showing up at all, anywhere, on the platform. Maybe even granular control so you could check one box to just block that artist everywhere, and another if you still want their “features” to appear in the tracklists for albums you listen to.

I also think that these services should start looking into informing listeners on artist pages about things that someone may want to know before listening to an artist. These pages already have biographies on them, why not include the facts about abuse allegations as well?

Apple Music Hits 40 Million Subscribers

Jason Tate

Apple Music has hit 40 million subscribers:

The service still has a ways to go before it surpasses Spotify, which currently has 70 million paid Premium subscribers. A report in The Wall Street Journal earlier this year suggests that Apple Music’s quicker growth rate (five percent versus Spotify’s two percent growth) could mean it surpassing the Swedish streaming service as soon as this summer, however.

Jimmy Iovine Said to Be Transitioning Roles at Apple

Jimmy Iovine
Jason Tate

Jimmy Iovine will reportedly be moving into a reduced role at Apple Music:

The latest update to Iovine’s reported on-again-off-again relationship with Apple Music comes by way of The Wall Street Journal, which positions the move not as a full exit, so much as a reduced role. According to the report, Iovine will be swapping his current oversight role in August for something more of the consulting variety.

Not Everything Is an Album

Jason Tate

Benjamin Mayo writes about one of the bigger issues I have with Apple Music’s categorization of albums:

What a human would think of as an artist’s albums, and what Apple Music lists, are completely different. EPs, singles, specials, deluxe, originals are all shoehorned under one name ‘Albums’. There is no way to filter these out. This really makes finding what you want hard. When you know what you want to find, all this backwardly organised catalogue gets in your way.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard of a new artist, gone to their page to listen to their latest album, clicked the first “album” artwork I saw, and then had to click back once I realize it’s just a single release. This seems like a really simple fix in the interface.

Shazam Gets an Updated Design

Apple
Jason Tate

MacStories:

As it turns out, Shazam has continued to be updated and support Spotify since Apple’s acquisition. In fact, there have been at least four updates to Shazam since the acquisition including one today that adds synchronized lyrics and a design refresh of the app’s results screen.

The new UI looks great. The results screen is dominated by a background image of the artist. In the foreground is a big play button, the name of the song the app recognized, and the name of the artist. If you tap on the artwork, you get an image of the artist and album in some cases, plus more details on the artist, album, song, and release date.

It looks pretty good.