Just started my 3 months free trial and, already, I am disappointed!
I had expected it to offer more than Spotify or Deezer but it doesn’t seem to. A quick look at Van Morrison reveals much the same same selection as Spotify and Deezer therefore no Avolon Sunset, His Band and Steet Choir etc. No Hey Jude Hit Makers of course. Dylan’s newest isn’t here…….hmmm……think I will stick with Spotify which, at least links to my Sonos system.
Don’t especially like the interface either!
Of course I may be wrong – it’s possibly unfair to judge something after only 35 minutes!
It doesn’t have any of those things? Perhaps naively, I was half expecting the catalogue to be the same as iTunes.
If it continues to have the same glaring absences as Spotify I might continue avoiding streaming services for a bit longer. I don’t really want to have all the different music I want to listen to strewn across various platforms.
Google play music is still by far the best of the streaming services. Weird how they are quite bashful about it.
Correction- His Band and Street Choircis there but other than that just the usual suspects!
Yes maybe back to Google Play Music later in the year!
Christ, give it time they’ve just turned it on! It is coming to Sonos later in the year.
No doubt all the newspaper journalists will be wetting themselves over it as usual. Apparently the bitrate is worse than Spotify as well.
It`s time ALL artists pulled the plug on Apple/Spotify and others until they are paid a realistic rate of royalties.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens. The key to this being that unlike Spotify or Deezer, millions of iPhones, iPads, Macs will already have this installed on their device and Apple already has their credit card numbers so potentially if a smallish percentage of them decide to sign up (or indeed forget to cancel after the free trail) they could become the leading streaming service and indeed potentially stack up an enormous pile of cash that the music industry will be keen to get a share of.
That $9.99 per month (not sure what it will be in sterling) is perhaps more than most people under 25 will have ever spent on music, and potentially considerably more than the more casual music fan who 20 years ago would maybe just have bought the odd Coldplay and Foo Fighters CD would spend in a year. To pull it off they’ll need to change the habit of getting music for nowt.
I think the Beats Radio thing that seems to hinge on us all suddenly wanting music recommendations from Zane Lowe and Dr Dre is wide of the mark – the idea of a global radio station sounds rather bland to me and we’re already awash with people vying to ‘recommend stuff’. There is also the ‘connect’ thing which sounds like ‘Ping’ all over again – I think Twitter and Facebook are so well established as platforms for bands to engage with fans although the latter expects artists to pay ££s to promote stuff to their fans so not sure if Apple are planning to charge them to do that on Apple Music? but I’m interested to see how that side of it will work.
Ultimately it’ll be down to whether people will subscribe for ££s or stick with the advertising funded services like Spotify. Don’t most kids just listen to music on YouTube for nothing anyway? Apple can of course afford for it to fail.
I’ll probably sign the free trial and check it out but I’m still charging up my Mp3 player so I can listen to music regardless when the train goes in the tunnel or there’s no 4G or Wifi or whatever…lest we all forget a large part of the sucess or otherwise of Streaming music is in the hands – not of the slick, hipster friendly maker of shiny white plastic gadgets – but in the hands of the rather less groovy companies in charge of the creaky mobile network and internet service providers.
For the record I am an Apple “fanboy” but I love my Spotify and use it everyday. I spent the evening listening with Apple Music and liked it much more than I expected. I was very impressed hat its recommendations were right on the money and I even found a Buckingham-Nicks tune from 1996 I’d never heard of.
It seems it won’t let you save songs without iTunes Match, which I don’t have, but might now consider. iTunes Match solves the “where are Beatles band ?” issue by looking at your installed music on your hard drive, matching it to a song that Apple already has in the cloud or if it’s missing, will upload your copy for streaming anywhere in your account. As I see it it’s a seamless way to incorporate the music you have that’s not on Apple Music with the service.
I only recently signed up for Match, and I’m not sure about it. I’ve got 19,000+ songs in my iTunes library, but after all the scanning, Match has only put 10,000ish in the cloud. It seems to have done it very haphazardly as well, with some songs on an album uploaded and others not. Not sure I’ll be back next year.
Trying it out but a bit confused as to what it does or doesn’t
Im a bit wary of the integration with my own music as i dont want that fiddled with
Whilst I doubt I’ll use it that much, I think the radio idea could work. Listened to it this morning and I liked the track integration – if you liked a tune you heard you can easily add it to one of your offline playlists.
Zane Lowe though – gosh, I couldn’t take too much of him blathering on about how everything is so epic
There is only one dealbreaker for me. Would I be able to migrate all the playlists I’ve built up on Spotify over the last five years? I’m too far in now. Very difficult to start again with a new service.
Well I just signed up and following the recent Floyd threads here am happily listening to Atom Heart Mother for the first time in about 44 years
I realised that my total music listening time for the past few weeks has been Spotify playlists compiled by members of this site. So unless you lot decide to move over I will be staying with Spotify.