Apple Music was launched on June 30th after being introduced at WWDC 2015. The services bring a Spotify like experience while integrating with your purchased and ripped iTunes library, keeping all your music in a neat and tidy place. I've had a chance to take a deep dive into Apple Music and here are my first impressions.

Apple Music is a version 1 product. In fact it actually feels like it could still be considered a beta. I took these points into consideration while using the service knowing that most bugs and issues would be cleared up with .1 updates and ultimately with the release of iOS9 this fall. I've been reading many reviews on Apple Music with alot of negative feedback. We live in a society where things must be perfect from the get go and Apple has always been held to a higher standard than most. I try to keep perspective. Rolling out an International streaming music service must be difficult. While I expect the best out of Apple I also expect bumps along the road. This is what we get from "Tim Cook's Apple".

Beats1

I think the problem most people are having with the selection of music itself on Beats 1 is it's very eclectic and not one genre. This breaks the mold of the typical radio station that focuses on one specific genre or category. This feature alone is what I think makes Beats 1 great and allows for excellent music discovery. I got used to the Radio 1 style of broadcasts from my college days of downloading Annie Nightingale and other Radio 1 episodes which featured a variety of music styles.

In the first few hours alone of tuning into Beats 1 I've discovered new music from different genres I've never heard before or that I would have never searched out myself. The fact DJ's like Zane Lowe and Julie Adenuga not only introduce me to these new tunes but also give me feedback on it's origin and their personal stories regarding said tunes really keeps me interested and locked in. Most people hate the voiceovers on Beats 1. I really enjoy them. It gives the station a human feel and not a computer curated feel. The tracks that I discover on Beats 1 that I like or want to triage to another playlist later get added to a "Discovered on Beats 1" playlist.

Zane and Julie have been my favorite daily DJ's so far. They are a pleasure to listen to. Refreshing voices. The voiceovers are minimal and just what you would expect from a radio DJ. People say there is a special place in hell for radio DJ's who talk over music. Listen to a DJ Clue mixtape and get back to me. I think most of the complaints in this regard (crap, I'm going to sound old here) are millennials just not being used to the style of terrestrial radio. It's like handing a 15 year old a walkman and saying enjoy!

iCloud music library / itunes

I think I may be in the rare category of not experiencing any issue with my library since day one of using Apple Music. Mind you I have always been extremely anal with the organization of my library. I currently have over 16,000 tracks and have been using iTunes Match since it's inception. Maybe I use my library differently than others? I don't know. I figured I would share my iTunes/iCloud Media Library workflows and experiences. I will also share some of the things I have run into and the workarounds I have found to help me keep my sanity until all the bugs are worked out.

First off a little background. I've been an exclusive Spotify premium member since 2011 and have not used any other streaming services since. I have also been an iTunes Match subscriber since day one. My playlists on Spotify consist of years. Each year I create a playlist that corresponds to that year and throw all the tracks I discovered within that year into that playlist. So I have 4 playlists (all made available offline) each consisting of approximately 100 tracks going back to 2012. I also have one master playlist called TBL (to be listened) which I throw tracks and albums into that I want to listen to later. After listening to those TBL's I triage those tracks into other playlists or just remove them all together if they are not to my liking.

I decided to spend the first weekend with Apple Music recreating all these playlists. I wanted to wait for an import tool to bring my Spotify lists over to Apple Music but figured this was a far way off. Any third party service available to handle this I was not confident in it working 100%. I also wanted to manually search and see just how many tracks I could find in Apple Music that were also in Spotify's catalog (this is a lot faster using iTunes for Mac). Amazingly I was able to recreate every playlist without missing any tracks with the exception of the recently removed Prince tracks from all streaming services. That being said...

MY ENTIRE LIBRARY WAS NOW FULL OF TRACKS THAT WERE NOT BEING ORGANIZED PROPERLY!!! ARGH!!! OCD OVERLOAD!!!

This was my process. I printed out all my Spotify playlists (pro tip, open a Word or Pages document, go to your Spotify playlist, CMD-A and drag and drop the whole list into the open document and the list will be ready for printing) and then started searching the Apple Music catalog for each track on my Spotify lists and started adding them to my new Apple Music playlists. When I was done I was extremely satisfied, until I looked at iTunes for Mac. I now had duplicate tracks. For example, I added Kendrick Lamar - King Kunta to my 2015 playlist. When I looked at My Music, since I already had purchased Kendrick Lamar - To Pimp a Butterfly and it was in my library and iTunes Match, it now showed the Apple Music copy which was sitting right next to the other copy. This drove me crazy. I know you can disable iTunes to only show offline music (View>Show Offline Only) but I didn't want to disable the viewing of tracks I discovered on Apple Music/Beats 1. I simply wanted things more organized. My solution...

What I figured out is Apple Music tracks may not match what is in your local library due to tags or some other metadata (this also could possibly just be a bug that will be fixed in a future update). So for now on, if I know a track or album is already located within my iTunes Match library and I want it on one of my "yearly playlists" I simply add the track to the playlist from THAT library and NOT Apple Music. This was actually an easy fix after creating my playlists since tracks that are not in your local library have an iCloud icon next to them. This now keeps my library neat and does not create new albums for songs. I believe this is the way Apple intended for it to work but is not obviously clear.

I would also like to mention that each one of these yearly playlists is also downloaded for offline listening. I have not had one issue having them all download to my iDevices. I think there may be a bug with the iPhone icon that appears next to tracks that are available offline. If you switch your playlist view to "offline tracks only" you will clearly see they all downloaded. You can also view this by going into Settings>Usage and check the Music app section.

conclusion

I think for most people who collect a nice library like myself, Apple Music can cause some confusion in terms of organization. For people who just stream and have never been about owning the music or collecting it, Apple Music is a smooth transition. I take great pride in keeping my collection organized like a champ. I blame this on just being an old skool music lover who collected CD's, cassettes, mixtapes and Napster MP3's over the years.

I have been using Apple Music since day one and have not opened Spotify since. I enjoy the curation immensely and the playlists that are recommended in the For You section are superb, mixtape style playlists.

As of today I will be a subscriber.

shows of note

Here are a list of the shows I am currently enjoying on Beats 1.

If you'd like to check out the daily schedule Apple has setup a Tumblr here.