151–160 of 268 posts
What makes this frustrating for me is that the underlying Apple Music API is actually quite robust, such that it really is quite straightforward to create an Apple Music client that is extremely performant. I just can't wrap my head around why Apple can't do it themselves.
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Because Music is anything but "first party" from Apple's perspective. A lot of people seem to have the wrong idea about Apple's software, with the exception of macOS. The point of the software is to entice the customer with a complete ecosystem. Once they've sold you their laptop they've made their money. At that point, they're not that interested in putting resources towards things like Music when their hardware con…
You’re re-treading an old line of argument that doesn’t make sense anymore especially in this context. Apple has identified services as an area they went to grow. Music is an ongoing subscription service, with plenty of competition. If they want to retain or grow their paying subscribers Apple needs to improve their software with the same attention to quality they devote to hardware.
How are first party Apple apps so horrible on first party hardware? I don't use Music but I decided to check out Severance (great show) and the TV app was absolutely horrible to use in every way. The player would only stream some really low resolution on my monitor so I tried downloading the episodes and the whole app lagged so badly every time I would queue something up or delete it. It even completely stopped strea…
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> I can play any music I want right now for a £10/month fee. Any music? Nope. Maybe the popular stuff that plays on the radio.
I personally don’t find that to be true. Time for some objective anecdata. There is a site [0] that ranks how “mainstream” one’s listening habits are based on their last.fm profile. Punching in my username, I get ranked as 12% mainstream (i.e., only 12% of last.fm users listen to music more obscure than mine). Keep in mind, this is relative to last.fm users, whose musical tastes are probably more obscure than the gen…
Apple Music has a feature based on iTunes Match that will take your local files and attempt to match them based on their metadata and audio fingerprint.
The last time I used it, from my (then) ~5000 song library, it matched ~3600. That means that a good third of the music I listen to is not available in the same exact version on streaming services.
I dug into why, and reasons include:
- The LPs were never licensed properly. Such as Exmilitary by Death Grips, which is a bootleg release with copyright issues.
- The artist hasn't signed up for streaming, like it used to be the case with Tool. Or they only stream on one platform and not another. Dr. Dre and Jay-Z come to mind. All three artists I mentioned in this bullet are "really mainstream."
- The version I like is not the streaming release. I like the casette version of Ashes 2 Ashes, Dust 2 Dust by Tommy Wright III, but not the CD reissue.
- The artist is actually too niche. I have quite a few things in my collection from Bandcamp or Soundcloud that don't exist elsewhere.
- The release is "weird." Like the radio stations from the classic GTA games.
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Because Music is anything but "first party" from Apple's perspective. A lot of people seem to have the wrong idea about Apple's software, with the exception of macOS. The point of the software is to entice the customer with a complete ecosystem. Once they've sold you their laptop they've made their money. At that point, they're not that interested in putting resources towards things like Music when their hardware con…
You’re re-treading an old line of argument that doesn’t make sense anymore especially in this context. Apple has identified services as an area they went to grow. Music is an ongoing subscription service, with plenty of competition. If they want to retain or grow their paying subscribers Apple needs to improve their software with the same attention to quality they devote to hardware.
I get your point, but no, they just need to sell more devices; act anti-competitive by bundling Apple Music on every iPhone's homescreen, thus giving Apple Music billions in free advertisement that Spotify could never get even if they paid, and by setting Apple Music as the default. Then, make it hard to switch (e.g. if you cancel Apple Music, you lose your library 90 days later). Make sure Apple Music has the home advantage by sharing advance knowledge of new APIs and hardware with the Apple Music team, but obviously not with Spotify.
Plus Apple has strong psychological advantages, since Apple users seem more likely to blindly want to stick to all-Apple solutions and default apps regardless of app quality. Compare that to Windows, where users can't wait to get rid of Edge, and Android, where only a minuscule portion of people insist on an all-Google experience.
I don't believe there's any real "corrective mechanism" inside Apple to make Apple Music or TV+ the very best, because they don't need to be.
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>These streaming platforms are so bad. We had better software in the 90s and 00s. You are sitting in a chair in the sky . I can play any music I want right now for a £10/month fee. In the 90s I was buying CDs with five good songs and five filler for £15. In the 2000s I was finding stuff that I could pirate, downloading it, and playing it on my beige desktop computer because there was no such thing as a smartphone.
> In the 90s I was buying CDs with five good songs and five filler for £15. That is unfortunate. In the early 2000s, I was cleaning up buying used CDs for $1 on Half.com and Amazon. The whole thing about "1 good song on a 10-song album" is a remnant of Steve Jobs' iPod marketing pitch designed to get people buying songs piecemeal for 99c on iTunes. Regular people buy music if they want to support the artist. Trying t…
Yup. I remember people used claim "piracy would ruin the quality of music" - but the truth is, it's these streaming services that are killing the art of the album.
I like Apple Music because it integrates well with the Apple line. More importantly though it is one of the highest paying per stream to artists [1]. Streaming needs to be much more lucrative for artists and consumer choice helps that. It is nice to be able to buy the music as well if you want to support. Being part of Apple One is huge as well. The latest music streaming royalty rates are as follows. PLATFORM ROYALT…
This has very little to do with the service, and as everything to do with the Big Four (now Three) [1] that control basically all of music.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry#Consolidation
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That higher royalty isn’t because of altruism. It’s probably a factor of licensing volume.
Comments like this one are a real puzzler to me. Why does it matter that the higher royalty is not out of altruism? It’s money! Money doesn’t care. More money for artists is good. You can’t buy a cheeseburger with altruism. I guess I’m just not sure what sort of “gotcha” this is supposed to be. The beauty of incentive alignment is that you don’t have to waste your time trying to discern nebulous motivations of large…
All the money that streaming services pay out goes to copyright holders. Guess who the copyright holders are. If you say "artists", think again. For the absolute vast majority of music it's the Big Four/Three: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry#Consolidation
So, when the likes of Spotify pay 60-70% of their revenue to the record labels, and the artists get peanuts... Spotify (and Tidal, and Apple Music, and...) get blamed. Now this is a real puzzler.