3 ms·

Honestly, my biggest gripes with Apple Music come from Apple not being a data-science-type company. When I go to the "For You" section of the music app, more o

by dhagz 10y ago

Honestly, my biggest gripes with Apple Music come from Apple not being a data-science-type company. When I go to the "For You" section of the music app, more often than not I'm greeted with albums I already have in my library, playlists titled "Intro to <artist I already listen to>", or random curated playlists that I've recently browsed through. Basically, it gives me nothing valuable on a regular basis. I find it very hard to discover new music with Apple Music. With Spotify, there was my "Discover Weekly" playlist which was perfect - 30 new songs that I should like given my listening history. And Spotify was fairly good at recommending new playlists to me as well. Perhaps with Apple Music I'm taking the wrong approach. It might be more effective to use Radio for discovery, but for being based on Beats the curated playlists seem really lacking.

nihonde 10y ago
I keep bumping into this problem: a company that has a large media library (video, music, books) offers a client that lacks the basic search, filtering, and sorting functions that any half-decent programmer would consider Step One of a client app. I don't want clever discovery and recommendation algorithms (which never work, by the way); I want faceted search, filtering, and sorting. Amazon's storefront is just about the only AAA online service that gets this more or less right. I just don't understand what is going on at Apple and Netflix.
- vintermann 10y ago
  I don't want clever discovery and recommendation algorithms (which never work, by the way) I take it you haven't tried discover weekly, then? To be fair, it needs a fair bit of listening history to start making recommendations. But it is ridiculously good. Since what you will like isn't a deterministic function of your listening history, it has to take some chances, you have to accept that it won't always hit. When it does, though, oh boy.
  - nihonde 10y ago
    I don't use Spotify. I'll take your word for it, though. I grew up with radio, and I used to like to listen to the college stations where there was no format and the selections came from the personal taste of another person. On Apple Music, the curated playlists are OK in that respect. Also, since I live in Japan, the "Top 100" lists change really quickly and can include some interesting and surprising discoveries. My gripe isn't so much with the efficacy of recommendation engines, anyway. I'm complaining about the lack of useful basic search/sort/filtering. I would say about 50% of the searches that I run on Apple Music end with a blank artist placeholder page, or re-route me into the iTunes Store, or pull up totally irrelevant results, or otherwise end in confusion because there app, the store, the library, and the streaming service are all whipped up into a tangle that no one can seriously be expected to navigate.
threeseed 10y ago
The other radio stations e.g. Soundsystem, Pop, whatever are another option. But fully agree that the For You section is pointless and worst of all unimaginative. I rarely want to hear a playlist of 30 Drake songs in a row. Spotify absolutely kills Apple Music when it comes to their core and community generated playlists. But I absolutely love Beats 1 so keep using it because of that.

by dhagz 10y ago

nihonde 10y ago

I keep bumping into this problem: a company that has a large media library (video, music, books) offers a client that lacks the basic search, filtering, and sorting functions that any half-decent programmer would consider Step One of a client app. I don't want clever discovery and recommendation algorithms (which never work, by the way); I want faceted search, filtering, and sorting. Amazon's storefront is just about the only AAA online service that gets this more or less right. I just don't understand what is going on at Apple and Netflix.

vintermann 10y ago
I don't want clever discovery and recommendation algorithms (which never work, by the way) I take it you haven't tried discover weekly, then? To be fair, it needs a fair bit of listening history to start making recommendations. But it is ridiculously good. Since what you will like isn't a deterministic function of your listening history, it has to take some chances, you have to accept that it won't always hit. When it does, though, oh boy.
- nihonde 10y ago
  I don't use Spotify. I'll take your word for it, though. I grew up with radio, and I used to like to listen to the college stations where there was no format and the selections came from the personal taste of another person. On Apple Music, the curated playlists are OK in that respect. Also, since I live in Japan, the "Top 100" lists change really quickly and can include some interesting and surprising discoveries. My gripe isn't so much with the efficacy of recommendation engines, anyway. I'm complaining about the lack of useful basic search/sort/filtering. I would say about 50% of the searches that I run on Apple Music end with a blank artist placeholder page, or re-route me into the iTunes Store, or pull up totally irrelevant results, or otherwise end in confusion because there app, the store, the library, and the streaming service are all whipped up into a tangle that no one can seriously be expected to navigate.

threeseed 10y ago

The other radio stations e.g. Soundsystem, Pop, whatever are another option. But fully agree that the For You section is pointless and worst of all unimaginative. I rarely want to hear a playlist of 30 Drake songs in a row. Spotify absolutely kills Apple Music when it comes to their core and community generated playlists. But I absolutely love Beats 1 so keep using it because of that.