What’s not handy, however, is that Apple Music lacks a heart tracker at its heart, so you can’t for instance find that song you favourited at lunch over Beats 1 radio, nor can you find your favourites from a few days ago.
You’ve favourited them, sure, but they don’t exist for you to find, and so your act of favouriting them wasn’t technically for your benefit, but rather that of an algorithm trying to work out what you do and don’t like. Every music system uses something like this, but most of them provide your favourites in a location, allowing you to at least look back at them.
On Google Play Music, it’s a playlist called “thumbs up”, but with Apple Music, that’s not what is going on, and instead the only way to at least tell the system that you want to hold onto the music is to add it to your library, but just like with the synchronised playlist problem — or lack there of — as noted above, you’ll find if you jump from device to device, they may not necessarily come with you.
Worse, music you’ve purchased may actually disappear or just refuse to play in the Apple Music system, which we’ve seen a few times.
These bugs and lack of features lead us to the belief that while Apple Music is, in theory, a positive influence — because its editorial and curated system is something other music services are only now cottoning on to — its lack of long-term usability and overly complicated interface let it down in the face of these other ones.
In fact, about the only thing it has going for it is how well it integrates into the Apple ecosystem, but that’s partly because Apple made the software to work with its devices so well, and so it naturally looks good like the iPhone, and the iPad, and a Mac, and so on and so on.
But it’s not the mature bang-on product you expect out of Apple, and while it’s not the travesty that was the first generation of Apple Maps, it has many problems.
It also has one striking positive: you get three months free, which is a great trial option no other music service provider can match.
Is this enough? Only time will tell.
Conclusion
We held off publishing this review for longer than we’d like, but partially because some of the bugs we were seeing in our testing might have been limited to Australia specifically.
After sending some feedback to Cupertino and waiting for patches, and essentially going beyond the trial, most of the bugs we found in the beginning have gone away, though some of the quirks like that inability to see what you’ve favourited still remain, as well as the odd playlist glitch and disappearing song.
On the positive side, the company isn’t totally resting on its laurels and is actively changing the service, improving it, with the end result being an improvement to the Apple Music service, and that positivity can kind of be applied to the rest of the feeling you get on Apple Music: it’s a positive influence for the industry.
Even if it isn’t perfect, Apple Music still feels like a positive shift from a world built on figuring out what you want from the algorithm to the more human side of things, with the curated playlist, whether it’s found in the form of a “check whenever you want” playlist or a “listen live on the radio” playlist.
That human side of music has kind of been missing from the digital music services, and it’s nice to see it return.
In fact, Apple’s push for this is even having an effect on the other music services, with Google Play Music rolling out its own curated music playlists in the past few months.
But back to Apple Music, because is it worth trying?
We’re going to go with yes on this one, simply because Apple has made it much easier to get in there with a three month trial, something no other music service has matched, though Pandora and Spotify do offer free options that help.
That quarter-year trial does help, and the fact that Apple is developing its Music service for Android does too, because you shouldn’t need to be locked in, but just be aware that if you don’t like what Apple is offering, it’s not as if there’s a shortage of music services out there, so don’t feel compelled to want to like it, because like the services offering unlimited music services, you have plenty to choose from.
