There’s also the radio side of things, and this is a two prong effort, delivering a customisable Pandora-style digital radio service as well as a real “live” radio service.
The Pandora-inspired radio service is handy because you can take those artists you already follow and try and find new ones to listen to, using that heart system to say approve or disapprove of others.
You’re not technically disapproving of anything, mind you, and Apple’s “heart” system doesn’t really ever say you dislike something, which makes it different to the other music services. Instead, it’s just relying on what you like, what you listened to, and what you skipped, though we’re not quite sure if it’s ever going to get the right message that skipping through a song several times may not mean you don’t like the song, but just didn’t want to listen to it at that time.
Beats 1 Radio is the other part of the radio effort, and it’s worth talking about solely because it’s an interesting take on what radio is meant to be. We’re not sure it technically qualifies as “live” as Apple suggests it is, as not all shows appear to follow that definition with some pre-recorded, but it is definitely one of the interesting evolutions of radio.
Like internet radio, Beats 1 isn’t a station you can get on your old wireless, relying solely on being connected to the internet, which on a phone may be wireless, but at home or in the office is probably wired in some way, whether it’s through the Ethernet connection to your computer or the home broadband cables used to deliver the internet to a modem or router of some form in your home.
Long story short, Beats 1 isn’t radio in the way most people think of it, but it does deliver a radio-like service at the same time to everyone else in the world. New York and Sydney may be in totally different time zones, and from Sydney’s point of view is in the future, but if you listen into Beats 1, you’re hearing the same material at the same time.
You’re not just hearing it either, but you’re also seeing it.
Digital radio may have brought album art and weather and news images to people’s devices, but Beats 1 delivers album and song information if it exists on the Apple Music catalogue, as well as the ability to “heart” those songs again — like the rest of the system — and add them to your library.
And this happens while the DJ is talking, so those awkward moments where on live radio you frustratingly want the DJ to list the songs that you caught halfway and liked don’t have to happen, and you can just see what you heard and add it to the system.
The Beats 1 radio service isn’t totally popular music either, but it is predominantly that, so depending on what sort of music you want to listen to, it may be worth checking out the schedule. If, however, you have very eclectic tastes, tuning in when ever you want does provide a bit of a reprieve from your regular library, so it’s a great feature and a potential influence to the way the digital music world can change, though Apple’s connections to musicians and artists does help this, as does its ownership of Beats, we suspect.
So there’s the music side of things, and how it integrates is super important as well, with iTunes pretty much replaced with an app designed to hook into Apple Music.
It doesn’t matter if you’re using this on an iPhone, an iPad, or even a computer, because the recent version of iTunes has been made to kind of get its hooks into Apple Music. You’re not required to use it, mind you, but if you do, the app feels like it’s working better.
And given Apple offers a three month free subscription service — longer than any other system out there — it’s a fair bet quite a few people are trying it. We’re now into our fourth month and have started paying, though this may have more to do with needing to finish the review and less with actual reliability, and here’s why: for all the good Apple Music brings, it also brings a little un-Apple-like clutter, and some of the bugs still don’t feel like they’ve moved on.
The interface is one area that feels like it has too much going on, because while the player controls are easy to get used to, some icons just don’t feel like they’re in the right place, while others are superfluous and in there a few times.
It’s not really a problem with how you select your music either. That’s easy, and has you jumping between five tabs at the bottom of the screen, much like how iTunes has always worked it.
In Apple Music, you now get the curated playlists selected based on your music tastes in “For You”, new music and access to allot the other easily accessible playlists in “New”, both your own custom radio stations and Beats 1 in the aptly titled “Radio” section, and even a bit of social amplitude in “Connect” (below) allowing you to almost feel like the artist is talking directly to you with updates and photos using an Apple Music artist-only social network.
The final tab is “My Music”, and as the name implies, it’s the music you’ve been listening to and adding to your library.
Well, sort of, anyway, because music added across your Appme devices aren’t always touched, making the cross platform music control not always fantastic.
But we’ll get into bugs like this momentarily, because for now we need to show how confusing the interface for Apple Music can be, so let’s show that interface.
