Quick impressions of Apple Music

I’ve been waiting for a long time for a service that would combine: (1) the more obscure items in my music collection, which can’t be found on any streaming service; and (2) a huge catalog of stuff I haven’t heard yet; and (3) a decent Mac app. So I’ve been looking forward to this quite a bit.

• It seems odd to me that Beats 1 doesn’t allow skipping, when all the other ‘stations’ (is this the correct term?) do. Why are we limiting ourselves to what FM radio can do?
• It also seems odd that none of the stations, Beats 1 or otherwise, allow you use the ‘back’ button in the playback controls, even if you are a paying subscriber.
• Since Beats 1 is a series of scheduled shows, shouldn’t we be able to look back and listen to stuff that was previously on air? Why can’t we? This seems like it would solve the unable-to-skip problem; people would have the choice of listening live and not skipping, or listening to past shows and skipping if they wish.
• I listened to Beats 1 for about an hour on my commute home today. I heard some things I like, some things that were okay, and some things I didn’t like. I will attempt to continue listening to it sometimes, as I like being exposed to new things.
• The DJs talking over the music, and playing random sound clips over the music, were annoying.
• In Beats 1, the ‘currently playing’ metadata seemed to have trouble keeping up; several times, it continued to show a previous song long after it had ended. This was frustrating when I liked a song and wanted to know what it was.
• Radio (other than Beats 1) already seems much improved over iTunes Radio, which I gave up on after a few days. I’m hoping it will have enough variety that I won’t get bored of it. After only a few minutes of listening, it already helped me discover something new that I like!
• I had read in Dalrymple’s review that there was a way to see song history for radio, but I couldn’t find it for the life of me. Finally, I figured out that you need to tap the ‘list’ icon while listening to a station, which shows you the ‘Up Next’ song… and then scroll up. There was no indication that there was any more content in that list, so I don’t know how anyone’s supposed to figure that out.
• On iPhone, I was looking through My Music in Artist view, and I kept trying to get a list of songs by an artist, but it would start playing a song instead. This was very frustrating until I finally realised that tapping the artwork starts playing immediately without showing you a list, but tapping the text brings you to the list I wanted.
• Adding music to your library works pretty much how you’d expect. It even shows up immediately in Smart Playlists, which is particularly important to me as I make heavy use of them. I also make heavy use of star ratings and play counts, so I’m glad to see that’s all there too.
• I haven’t tried much in ‘For You’ yet, but I hope to spend some time with it soon.
• Why does ‘For You’ include so many albums that are already in my library? I already know I like those. That’s not helpful.
• The bubbly first-time setup UI in ‘For You’ was cute, but it seemed unnecessary; I already have 1200 albums in iTunes Match. My play counts are in there too. Couldn’t they have gotten the process started by figured out some of the artists I like based on that?
• I don’t understand Connect.

But most of the points I’ve listed are of little importance, since it does the main thing I wanted it to do (cf. first paragraph). So far, I’m happy.