Apple announces Apple Music radio

I try Apple Music about once a year. Only when they are offering a free trial. I always cancel the trial quickly. Apple Music is just bad. Ignoring my experience with a privacy violation that still makes me question Apple's commitment to privacy, nothing about Apple Music is enticing. Ignoring the confusing UI, music discovery is awful.

Apple has a large selection of songs it can pull from to know what I do and do not like, and could easily recommend things for me. The last time I checked out the recommendations, they were awful. Spotify? Spot on. =) Also, Spotify is just available everywhere I want it. Apple? Pretty much "Apple brand" or nothing. Apple is not the end-all of my universe. I'm sure Apple Music is fine if you ONLY use Apple products or listen via Apple approved products, but no one I know does that. Not even the iOS developers I know.

Anyways, even if you are a fan, you have to admit their offering is pretty lame.

Definitely agreed on recommendations, I've just been switching over from Spotify to Apple Music this week (adding aftermarket CarPlay and Spotify's support for that was a trainwreck). Overall I like Apple's app better across all platforms, except using web rather than native on Windows. On Apple's platforms it's snappier than Spotify, feels properly native, and is presumably better for battery life since it's not made of a bunch of Chrome instances glued together. But I definitely feel like I'm losing something with Discover Weekly and Release Radar.

Apple has their "For You" tab, but it's not as streamlined and the recommendations have been much more hit or miss.

Maybe it needs some more time to figure out my music tastes.

Trying to understand. In a world of gazillions of radio shows online on so many platforms including direct and indirect competitors, with traditional shows going online, with platforms like pandora. Why two radio stations from one big company is such a big deal?

The negative opinions on Beats often seem snobbish and dare I say bigoted. But I will admit it was a strange get for Apple as a brand.

Although I remember some gossip about them buying it mainly for the music licensing deals that Beats had, and probably the recording industry clout of Dr. Dre.

I really don't understand what they've done with the Beats brand. They've released a handful of headphones (that in my experience have suffered an array of technical faults compared to reports from Airpods users) and Beats 1. Now they're killing off the latter.

It clearly fits into the Music product better but even after the corporate takeover there was something cool about "Beats" as a brand. It even sounded good in the stings. Oddly this is currently in Music as "Apple Music Beats 1" next to Hits and Country, which is even worse than one or the other.

The visual branding of all three stations is amateur too. Quite clearly so next to the Beats branding.

I wonder what the real success of the station has been - it seems to have all the right ingredients even if I'm not that interested after Julie left. It's always seemed a little discard by Apple, as it often is with these big tech companies and their side projects. If this was a business in its own right, as with Apple Music, I assume there'd be more publicity and a more competitive product.