The first thing I had to realize trying out Apple’s new Music service is that you have to rearrange how you think about iTunes. I’m one of those folk who threw up their hands in frustration when iTunes 11 came out with a quasi-iOS look and got rid of multiple windows. I quickly put iTunes back into as much of a classic appearance as I could with this list view. My first few hours with Music was an exercise in frustration because of this.

To really enjoy and make use of Music put your preconceptions behind you. Otherwise you, like me, will be constantly raving about the horrible buggy frustrating UI of iTunes. 

First things first. When viewing your music switch to artist view.¹ Yes viewing by artist is a pain when you have a nice playlist. Trust me though. If you don’t you’ll hate Music. 

When you are in artist view they’ll be a tab bar that says “All | My Music.” Click on “All” and you’ll see all the music for that artist that Music has. It’ll have their top songs, their top albums and more. Double click on a song if you like it and an album view will pop up. Now you can click on the icon that appears to the right of the song name when you mouse over it.² Now you can click and get the “Add to” menu. Click on it and get a sub menu with all your playlists.

Now I still think something that was a combination of the classic iTunes 9 design combined with the iTunes store would have been a better way to find and add music to playlists. But the new way makes a certain sense once you accept you have to take multiple steps through screen layers in an artist view. 

The reality is though that Apple’s really not pushing playlists. Somewhat surprisingly given how popular they are on Spotify. Oh, you can share playlists. When you click share you get an url you can share. Opening the url takes you to the playlist in iTunes (or on iOS Music). However the playlist button is not front and center in iOS. To bring it back you have to do a round about method of hiding the Connect button.

A lot of people looking at the UI are getting the idea that Apple’s trying to bring back the old pre-late 90’s style of DJs and radio. To me I’m glad those days are gone. However even for people like me it looks like Apple’s pushing curated playlists. Fortunately even the genius style of algorithmic playlists is making use of the curated playlists.³ At least they seem much more useful now than they were a month ago.⁴ We’ll see if they return to be useful or not. I’ve only made a few thus far. Apple definitely prefers you using the playlists that pop up in the For You tab. Most of these are curated playlists often with a strong album focus.

Albums are the focus once again. That’s a big shift as the introduction of the iTunes Store and Napster in the late 90’s and early naughts really pushed everyone to singles. Since most albums suck and have only a few good songs this is an interesting change. Some bands can manage a solid album. Most simply can’t. This means that bands that have a solid album as a whole get preference. I wonder if culturally people will adopt this album focus.

The most interesting features are under New and include playlists put together by bands and activity oriented playlists. At first glance this would seem a fantastic place to find workout playlists. In practice I have to admit the playlists were kind of underwhelming and focused on a style of music (pop) that I don’t care for as much. Others, especially joggers, might disagree. They have playlists focused on particular jogging speeds. If that’s your thing you might like them even if they do tend to be oriented around a certain style of electronica not everyone might appreciate.

The biggest weakness of Music definitely is the interface. Hopefully by next year the interface is more refined. I do fear for those of us who prefer to organize our own music. It’s clear that Apple’s shifted focus away from us the past few years. Making your own playlist is just far too convoluted. However I suspect that is the traditional power user vs. typical user scenario. If one thing has become clear the last decade it is that power users are not really a concern for Apple. (Sadly, but I’ve griped enough about that in the past)

One big problem on iOS is that while you can download songs for offline listening you can’t “download all” for a playlist like you could in Match. This sucks if you’ve added a few songs to a playlist. You have to go through and see what songs are missing and add them track by track. If you decided to go for a walk or workout and want a whole new playlist there’s really no easy way to do it.

The other problem is that there still are far too many album art screwups. Not as bad as with Match, but far more than there should be. And oddly the mistakes are often different. So albums that did display right sometimes no longer do. Albums that didn’t display proper art (or more typically no art) now might. When there’s a mistake it is now much more likely to be wrong album art rather than missing art – although heaven knows that happens too. What’s very weird, as in the screen grab above, is where one part of the screen has the right art but it doesn’t show up for the album. Clearly parts of Music/iTunes are finding the right art.

Overall I’m surprised how much I like the service. Before you sign up for the trial period⁵ make sure you backup your music. There are reports that Music is converting unDRMed Match downloaded music to DRMed Music music⁶ that you might not be able to play if you unsubscribe to Music. It’s actually not clear if you can leave Music and still play them under your Apple ID. However you clearly can’t play them on unauthorized devices. Which means no non-Apple devices. 

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