It’s jarring to see - it would only be justified if there was a ‘Here’s some albums from your library you haven’t played for a while’ row. That would be useful.
For You - Playlists
Although I quite like the artist playlists I don’t think they’re particularly eclectic or daring. It’s certainly not recommending many (if any) artists I’m not familiar with. I really want this to improve.
The curated various artist playlists are excellent though. I’ll give them that. You can tell they’ve been put together by humans and I enjoy them far more than I thought I would. I much prefer listening to artist albums but these work.
I'm very envious of the people who get to work on this curation. That would be my dream job.
What is ridiculous though is, guess what?
That’s right - playlist recommendations that ignore my library, particularly the ‘Intro to’ playlists.
If Apple looked at my collection and play history, they'd see that I really don’t need an ‘introduction’ to Belinda Carlisle, Hüsker Dü, Natalie Imbruglia, The Fall or Charli XCX. (Don't judge me). Yet, over my 3 month trial Apple Music has suggested these playlists to me, frequently. Almost every day also sees some sort of Madonna recommendation, and I've got almost her entire discography. A rotation of such a small number of artists is pretty poor irrespective of their (lack of) usefulness to me.
New
Browsing the ‘New’ section is massively frustrating. If you’ve played with it, you’ll know all about the navigation inconsistencies. If I was to list them all here, I’d be writing a book here, so I’ll just take one example.
Let’s take a look at what it offers me for Elton John.
I’ll start with a search.
Here I get links to his artist page, his Beats 1 radio shows, songs, albums, playlists where he’s featured, videos and an ‘Elton John station’.
All fine but it all goes wrong once I drill down a bit. Logically, I would go to the first result - Elton’s artist page.
I’m presented with ‘Top Albums’ and just ‘Albums’. Here’s where it goes a bit nuts.
There are more albums shown in ‘Top Albums’ than in ‘Albums’!
Both lists miss out parts of Elton’s back catalogue including some of his most critically acclaimed - there's no 'Don't Shoot Me I'm Only The Piano Player' or my favourite - ‘Madman Across The Water’.
My assumption from this page is that it's showing all the albums available and Apple Music therefore doesn’t have these classics.
Turns out, they are available (from a specific search on album name or, depending on your screen size, the initial global search) but not on the artist page. ¯(ツ)/¯
To be clear: the Artist page (also accessed from my library with a tab marked ‘All’ to differentiate from 'My Music') does not show all of that artist’s music.
There are tons of similar glitches like this.
Furthermore, there’s nothing tailored for me here in ‘New’. It’s a slightly altered version of the iTunes Store front page. A mainstream list of new and popular releases. It’s useful, but only to an extent.
This leads me to my biggest beef with Apple Music. It’s also been my long standing disappointment with iTunes. The one missing feature that should have been there for years:
My favourite feature in Rdio is the notifications page. It’s a constantly updated page showing all new releases added to the service from artists I’ve previously added to my collection of favourites.
This can be new singles, albums, back catalogue additions. They’re presented in a beautiful grid and I can add them to my collection with one click.
There’s no friction at all and it’s super useful.
