There were no major bugs, millions of phones didn’t brick and Zane Lowe appeared to kick off Beats 1 without a hitch – and with typical charm.
With the exception of Prince and Metallica not showing up to the party, the launch of Apple Music yesterday can, from a technical standpoint, be considered an emphatic success.
In the world of social media and an ocean of publicly expressed opinions, the words of professional reviews either mean less or more than they ever did, depending on your standpoint.
But as a barometer of how Apple‘s great leap into the streaming music world has been received, they’re pretty invaluable.
The good news for Cupertino’s devs is… it looks like you’re going down a storm.
All of the below are linked in the headlines if you want to go in-depth.
Re/Code: ‘Rich, robust – but confusing’
Good: ‘Would I pay $10 a month — $120 a year — to use it? My answer is a tentative yes, with some caveats. Apple has built a handsome, robust app and service that goes well beyond just offering a huge catalog of music by providing many ways to discover and group music for a very wide range of tastes and moods.’
Bad: ‘My biggest disappointment with Apple Music is that, unlike apps like SoundHound, it has no lyrics. Apple says it’s working on adding that feature.’
Overall: ‘It’s the most full-featured streaming music app I’ve seen — and heard — and the first I’d consider paying for. But it may overwhelm some users, and I’ll need to live with it more before I can reach final conclusions.’
The Verge: Something borrowed, something new
Good: ‘Although there are some unavoidable places where you can get lost, Apple Music has pulled off the basics of what you’d expect from a streaming music service. You can find the music you want (including, yes, Taylor Swift), and if you just want Apple’s curators to help you stop being An Old who only listens to Built to Spill because he stopped paying attention to music 10 years ago, you can do that, too. I’m looking forward to finding more.’
Bad: ‘Keeping your sense of place within the app can become difficult as you tap and swipe around.’
Overall: ‘Here’s Apple Music in a nutshell: it’s ambitious. It borrows ideas from nearly everybody: it has a clean UI like Rdio, a massive catalog like Spotify, a lot of music management buttons like iTunes, and human curation like Beats.’
Stereogum: Apple Music first impressions
Good: ‘So it’s only logical, then, that Apple Music exudes a certain fanaticism about its given medium: Fanatics are its market. Fanatics about music, rather than tech. People like me, in other words. ‘
Bad: ‘Though I’ve seen raves about the “For You” feature, that’s what actually gave me the most frustration: After I’d downloaded the new operating system and signed up for my three-month free trial with the streaming service, I found myself feeling embarrassingly befuddled as I attempted to tell it what genres I liked. As bubbles for “hits” and “classical” floated around, it actually took me what seemed like forever before I could see the categories for “hip-hop,” “dance,” “alternative,” and “pop”; I didn’t see “country” or “rock” until I’d hit a reset button.’
Overall: ‘When reviewers point out that Apple Music is more complicated than the idea of being able to buy any song you want for a buck, they’re right, but that’s kind of the point… Apple Music feels like the whole, with the already-existing ideas of passive streaming, on-demand streaming, curation, and access to a library of previously downloaded files all now combined so that in the future we may not have to think about them as separate again. And that is exciting.’
Rolling Stone: Everything you need to know
Good: ‘After you’ve plugged in all of your favorite genres and artists, the most reasonable first stop on a tour of Apple Music would be the “For You” tab on the far left. This is where the service suggests playlists based on your taste – introductions to bands, lists of deep cuts, refreshing takes on familiar artists (e.g., “Inspired by R.E.M.”) – as well as full albums you might like… Not bad. It’s the sort of thing that Spotify approximates, but often comes off a bit stilted and robotic.
Bad: With no other streaming-music analog on other services, [Connect] appears to be the service’s biggest uphill battle. Twitter and Facebook already have strong locks on artist-fan relationships and it seems unlikely that many musicians would want to share potentially embarrassing works in progress with fans and risk alienating them.’
Overall: With its vast selection of music and smartly curated playlists and radio, Apple Music is robust enough to compete with, and possibly supplant, Spotify and Pandora as the go-to service for music fans. At the same time, users will need to play around with it a bit and dig to move past some of the less immediately intuitive facets (i.e., just how deep the “New” tab goes) for it to hook them.
Drowned In Sound: Hands-on
Good: What it does best is what Apple always does best: it makes sense to bring all of these things together in one app – that’s the clever bit.
Bad: ‘Sadly, there wasn’t any big ooh-ahh firework moment when something truly original or previously unannounced appeared.’
Overall: ‘Apple have once again improved upon what already exists, and make it friendlier for mass consumers. Much like iTunes was the far more graceful version of Mp3.com and Vitaminic; or the iPod was a far smarter version of the MiniDisc (which I filled with MP3s from Napster), Discman’s which played data CDRs or those original RIO hard drives which played music files; Apple Music feels like a smarter streaming service, but it doesn’t do anything you haven’t seen before.’
Spin: What works and what doesn’t
Good: ‘Generally speaking, the colors, much like the Beats Music-derived floating genre circles, gamify the music listening experience — and may, SPIN speculates, have a tiny bit to do with one-upping Spotify’s new, extremely polarizing color.’
Bad: ‘Usability in general, while remarkably streamlined for such a complex product, might still prove to be a challenge: SPIN was walked through in an hour and 15 minutes and there were still some matters that needed clarification, while users have online guides as a resource — and, of course, the ever-helpful Geniuses.’
Overall: ‘“New” spotlights the best new albums and “Hot Tracks” based on both Apple Music’s streaming charts and the traditional iTunes charts, which track purchased songs; scroll down and you’re presented with literally hundreds of thousands of playlists, grouped into selections according to Apple Music Editors (e.g. “Americana,” which filters down into playlists like “It’s a Lazy Day” and “Southern Gothic Americana”), Activities, and Curators including Rolling Stone and Pitchfork.’
Mashable: It’s all about curation, curation, curation
Good: ‘It’s hard for me to over-stress how much I like For You. From the very beginning, the recommendations in playlists and albums that the app showed me were dead-on accurate, reflecting my various musical interests.’
Bad: ‘I’m not sure if Connect is going to work. It’s a great idea but to work will require that artists actively use it. Without seeing the toolset Apple is offering the artists to publish content, it’s hard for me to know whether they’ll bother with Connect or if they’ll just continue posting photos to Instagram, music clips to Soundcloud and videos to YouTube.’
Overall: ‘I have to say, Apple Music is a really well-designed app. There is a lot in the app — it’s jam-packed — but Apple has done a really good job of making the app easy to navigate.’
GIZMODO: Wait, do I like Alternative?
Good: ‘Here’s where Apple Music really clicked for me: The interface. It’s dense and rich—and by that I mean each page feels like it’s packed to the gills with playlists, artists, and singles, arranged in a variation of tiles that give the interface visual interest. If you don’t like what you see, just pull the page down and it’ll refresh with new options.’
Bad: What Apple had come up with was a kind of room-temperature indie porridge that, while I couldn’t object to it based on my answers, wasn’t very fun to listen to. I have to assume I didn’t spend enough time waiting for more artist bubbles to float across the screen earlier. But wouldn’t it have just been easier to give me a check-list, if Apple had wanted a full patient history?
Overall: ‘The DJ had told us pretty much everything we needed to know about how Apple plans to win this war: Target the whales—the stars like Swift and Dre—and pepper it with hit singles and albums that are accessible to a broad range of listeners. Match the libraries and price points of other streaming services, but back its own version with the cash and sheer firepower of one of the biggest (certainly one of the richest) technology companies in the world. Will it work? It has before.’
Business Insider: I used Apple Music for a few hours, and it already knows me
Good: Although Apple Music takes a little bit of time to get used to and learn how to navigate, the app is very visual in its overall design when compared to Spotify. The For You Tab is like a collage of album covers, and each Intro-style collection gets its own colorful background in your feed.
Bad: The biggest setback I’ve come across in the limited time I’ve used it is that it seems a bit confusing. There’s definitely a learning curve here that I didn’t encounter when I started using Spotify.
Overall: ‘If Apple’s curation system is as good as it seems, it can be a great app for discovering new music. Plus, it’s convenient for iPhone and iTunes users since it integrated directly with the music already stored on your phone.’Music Business Worldwide
