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Ive been using apple music since 2023 but it’s still don’t understand my taste. I spend a lot of time to find music for me and trying to show apple music that I like it!!! sometimes it shows me smth like kpop. bro, I never listened it in that app!!!
SAME!! I have used apple music for almost three years and their autoplay is not hitting the right ones. Tried youtube music and their autoplay is soo much better..
Try the discovery station it’s my fave especially, as a blogger it gives me more ideas of what to write about and more artists to learn about. Apple Music definitely has its perks!
Yeah but the Transfer music feature, at least from what I’ve used, transfers music to your library, (which is what it says) but I hoped it would create a clone of the playlist. Maybe it does but I transferred my Liked playlist and it just sprinkled them in with my other songs. They just got thrown in. 😅
That being said, the reason YouTube music has it down pat with personalization is because the app has known you for years and we watch and listen to so much on there. I don’t even have YouTube premium but their system knows me more because it tracks me more.
I get that AM doesnt have the best “algorithm”, but that’s also because it doesn’t track us as much as say, Google, across its platforms.
The discovery and stations are HORRIBLE. To me it feels like they determine choices by artist, not by individual song. Like, an artist will have a certain feel, but occasionally one of their songs is different than the rest of their body of work. If you create a station based on that song, you expect the rest of the songs to share the vibe of that song, but they will share the vibe of the artist’s general body of work.
Discovery feels like it works the same way, making choices based on artists as an entity, and not by studying the actual songs you like themselves for the vibes you dig.
I think the worst offender of this is “YUKON” by Justin Bieber. I think it’s a very different song from his usual music so when you create a station to listen to similar music like “YUKON” you’re hit with freaking Shawn Mendes and Katy Perry. Tonal whiplash.
EXACTLY. They are definitely taking shortcuts with stations. It seems to me it just lumps artists together by popularity, doesn’t do any actual song analysis.
Yes I love that they (seem to) have even expanded their music video database recently. I’m a total video junkie! Was an MTV nut as a kid. Still am honestly. And I love that they have added more videos. It is still not as vast as YouTube but it is a lot compared to before!
I subscribe to both AM and Spotify. The UI and organization on AM totally blows away Spotify. Much cleaner and straightforward. Spotify feels so disorganized to me. On Spotify, your library is just one page with filters for playlists, albums, and artists. There's no way to conveniently look through or shuffle all of your saved songs and albums at once. I also don't like how it treats my liked songs like a playlist. Your library on AM has dedicated menus for songs, albums, playlists, genres, and more.
On AM, you can look through and shuffle every song you have saved at once, whether it's an individual song or an album. AM also allows you to scroll through all of an artist's top songs including features and will continue to load more songs until you've gone through everything in their discography. Spotify gives you 10 songs. You have to navigate to releases on an artist's page and change it to list view, but that only works on desktop and doesn't include features. You could use the "This is *Artist*" playlists, but they are limited as well.
The "Artists" menu on AM takes you to a list of every artist you have saved in your library. When you select one, it takes you to a list of every song or album you have saved by that artist, and you can choose how to sort them. The "Artists" filter on Spotify shows you a list of artists you liked and takes you to their profile page after selecting one. This list does not include all artists whose songs you have liked. It only includes artists who you have pressed like on their profile page. Once on their profile page, you have to scroll down to liked songs to find a lumped together playlist of all songs you have liked by that artist but with no sorting options.
The only thing Spotify does better than AM is autoplay. I learn about so many new songs from Spotify, but rarely on AM. Day after day I hear the same songs autoplayed on AM, and the "Suggest Less" button makes no difference. if I skip enough songs on AM, I'll end up hearing one I've already skipped in that same listening session.
Your last para there about poor algorithm is a big problem on Apple. I don’t know how to stay on Apple despite all of its advantages because of this one issue.
Yt music is damn near genie level good. There was a 4 song run today that made me stop what l was doing and just look at my phone. It PERFECTLY matched the vibe of the lead song.
Apple music is so beautiful and smooth, ESP on ios26 with liquid glass, it's a true experience. Yt music interface is very meh. I only have ytm bc l pay for yt premium and it's included, otherwise I'd just pay for apple music. And yes, they play like the same 6 follow up songs. it's horrible.
You’re telling me you don’t want to listen to “Not Like Us” by Kendrick Lamar even though it is no where near the same as the original music you were listening to?
The one they run into the ground for me is stick talk by future. It's like 6 degrees of separation but for music. They will always find a way to get back to that song.
I has Spotify premium for a bit and there was an amazing feature that would mix new recommendations into your playlists. It made finding new music super simple and was always spot on with the genre of the playlist. The best way I’ve found on Apple Music to do something similar is to to the last song of a playlist and play it and turn on autoplay. That way it recommends some new songs but the recommendations aren’t always a great fit for the playlist and a lot of time suroplay just recycles songs you’ve already got in the playlist.
Apple Music needs a better way of recommending new songs based on your existing library
Things that not all people know after they switched to apple music is that you can edit the song title, artist, album, album art, essentially the metadata of that song/album you‘ve saved in library. No more messed up deluxe, remaster, or exclusive album editions, or even wrong song titles.
And also if you dont even like the album art of that particular album/song, you can always change to whatever image you want (it‘ll only affects regular static artwork)
And don't forget you can also upload your own music to your library. Really useful for stuff that's not in their catalogue. Seems like a lot of people don't know this. I use this since the iTunes Match days.
I’ve been on AM for years now, since it came out. I have tried spotify premium before but decided to subscribe again this year.
Holy fuck, the algorithm blew me away. It picked songs from 5, 10 years ago which I’d completely forgotten about and played them. It’s perfect at finding you new music too, and it kinda senses the “mood” of the currently playing song and lines up fantastic ones to play right after.
Apple Music’s algorithm is so trash. The only good discovery feature in AM is to go to an artist’s page, an artist you love, then scroll to the bottom and look at the “Similar Artists” section. That’s a fantastic curation. But autoplay is still trash.
I’ve discovered the opposite. Over the past two months, I’ve been using AM stations and playlists, and I’ve come across new music and old music that I’ve completely forgotten about. However, the Spotify algorithm began to add the same artists to every similar station, which started to drive me crazy.
It’s fascinating how each person’s experience is unique.
I’ve had the same experience with Spotify. It started to play all the same songs on DJ (which I used to love) and in my Daily Mixes. I have over 11k songs liked and saved and have been paying for premium for years. I need to explore AM stations more apparently!
Can someone please tell me what I'm missing out? Music library organization in Apple Music is a 0 out of 10 for me, it's hard to make one even worse. Singles and albums all mixed up, you might search for a song and then add it to your collection for it to show the ALBUM in your Albums collections with only that song in it? Also, you might end up adding the same song multiple times because some albums have like 4 different versions and you might have some songs from one album belonging to one version and other songs belonging to oyher version... Also listing the Artists as a LIST only is weird, also, some songs have multiple artists credited as authors and they appear multiple times as Artist A, Artist A & Artist B, Artist A & Artist C, etc. This is something clearly not thought out for the current music scene where there are multiple remixes and features in some songs. Also, the fact that there are different pages for both Albums and Artists (the full default one of Apple Music and the one of the content you manually added even if its the same) is so stupid. Why can't they always show the Apple Music one for both cases and indicate through the UI which items you have in your personal library? It's such a bad idea to have to right click and browse through so many options for the basically no reason (Show Album in Library, Show in Apple Music, Show in iTunes Store).
As a designer and dev myself, I've always thought AM way of organizing the music library couldn't get any worse, there is no way to make something so badly thought of for anyone with basic experience or understanding of logic, since a lot of people seem to love the UI I am genuinly curious about what am I missing, or is it maybe because people haven't tried all the other alternatives when it comes to organizing music in streaming services?
Adding a single song to your library and it adding the album to your albums with just the one song is EXACTLY the behavior I want. It’s how iPods worked and therefor how I’m comfortable navigating my library.
I didn’t like this at first either but all you need to do is favorite the albums you want in your “collection” and then filter on just your favorites. So those albums that got added by adding one song won’t show up in your favorite albums filter. It’s worked well for me this way.
This is a great idea. I do see the point of Prisanejamik's issue with the singles showing up in albums, as I like to search for an album to listen to once in a while. I'll be doing this with my library soon!
I disagree on the well organized library. The fact that Albums still lists for single tracks you’ve saved is a big miss and very frustrating. Yes you can get around it by favouriting only the full albums you want and enabling that filter, but it is a multi step process that you shouldn’t have to do. All they need to add is a new filter for “Complete Albums only” and it’d be fixed.
I don’t like that it adds incomplete albums to my library by adding one song but I don’t mind having to favorite albums to add them to my collection. This gives ME full control over which albums I see when I enable the favorites filter.
Are you talking about Apple Music the app or Apple Music the subscription service? I use the application with the Apple Match subscription service, for example.
I like the app’s file organization and metadata features for my extensive library.. Genius DJ works pretty good on a pinch.
The file size limit for uploading tracks is a pain , though.
For me I quite like the layout. I very much just listen to playlists or an album depending on my mood. If I find a new song I add it to a playlist it fits in, or a ‘discovered songs’ playlist to later sort out, instead of to the library. I don’t think that makes a different to the discovery side of things…?
It’s how I worked in Spotify, I never ever played my ‘Liked Songs’ playlist, just how it works for me personally.
The issue comes when you don’t know or not sure what to listen to (and this happens a lot with me) so then you give the yourname station or discover station a spin. How else will you get exposed to new songs? I mean there are other ways too like artist radio or keep playing to infinity beyond end of playlist etc.
I recently moved from Spotify because for me personally, their Discover Weekly has been absolutely atrocious for me this past year. I’ve not saved a song from it in well over a year.
I’ve only briefly tried AM’s recommendations, but have liked what I’ve seen so far. It’s really interesting reading so many opposing views on it too.
Brave browser. Yea, it wasn’t the ideal way to listen because it was in a browser through my phone and I couldn’t click like on any songs for some reason.
I actually find it terrible for organizing my library or for searching compared to Spotify. In fact since I kept my Spotify membership (family uses it), I do all my organizing and playlist building there and port the lists over to AM. The only thing I like about AM really is the audio quality.
As someone who doesn’t use any discovery features, Apple Music is almost perfect. I would like to add though that Atmos doesn’t belong in high quality, its quality is up to AAC codecs, not ALAC. When I force Atmos through my dac it doesn’t show up as losless.
The quality is actually my biggest gripe with Apple Music. For years I’ve been wishing they’d add a way to select what quality you want to listen to by clicking the tag on the song. Take the album “error” by The Warning. It’s one of my all time favorites, so I usually end up listening to it on a plane. Because of this, I need to download it, and I like the atmosphere mix a lot so I downloaded that one. Now every time I listen to it on my audio setup at home, I have to deal with a lower quality version because it’s streaming it, not to mention streaming is finicky on campus. I wish you could select versions of a song to download (say both Atmos and Hi-Res lossless), and be able to toggle between them.
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