7 ms·

Apple Music Style Guide

40 points by gerjomarty 5y ago

seabrookmx 5y ago
Fun fact: I worked at a medium-sized music distributor, and Apple actually gives distributors a "score" based on how close they are to the style guide. If your score falls below a certain threshold the time between delivery of your content to Apple and when it goes on the store is delayed because of additional quality controls applied to your content. If you have a good score, it will go live immediately (assuming it's release date is in the past). Lots of software development at this company was driven directly by changes to this style guide, since iTunes / Apple music were such a huge portion of revenue.
- PostThisTooFast 5y ago
  And yet iTunes was (and is) a royal piece of shit that Apple bought, but couldn't even do what EphPod (unauthorized free iPod software on Windows) did.
paul7986 5y ago
The UX of Apple Music has always been shockingly bad as it's Apple. Most notable playing a playlist then going to play something else ..ugggh & omg! More detailed example... my friend sends me a link to their playlist .. i click it .. it starts playing then when im done listening to a few songs its time for me to say hey siri play something outside of the playlist. When I do Apple Music pops up this message saying do you want to keep the playlist queued .. with two options "keep," or "clear," what im done with playing it .. i want to hear another song without having to mess with my phone/read or understand a message while driving. Just save this playlist for me and ill go back and play it later ... horrible and dangerous UX(annoying when not driving)! Spotify is totally different and does as expected! A better UX is just play what I asked no stupid pop up and when I say Siri start XYZ playlist it re-starts it from beginning and or Hey Siri start XYZ playlist from last played song. That is a safer UX and isnt Apple Music usage 50% in the car? Interestingly i see im being downvoted and upvoted .. would enjoy hearing others thoughts! Had a fun arguement with a friend about this!
- mttjj 5y ago
  You're likely being downvoted not because your discussion is without merit but rather because it has nothing to do with the submitted link. The submitted link is a guide for how to format and submit metadata for music files submitted to Apple Music and the iTunes store. It has nothing to do with the consumer's UX.
drcongo 5y ago
I have music on Apple Music but no artist profile as Apple won't let me submit a picture without my face shown. Fine for Daft Punk though.
- crooked-v 5y ago
  I've seen a few fairly obscure theme bands on Apple Music that have primary photos including literal masks and the like. Are you sure you're running into 'picture without a face' and not rather 'picture not distinctively representing real people'?
- historyloop 5y ago
  People often get frustrated that the famous and the rich are treated differently, but it's literally logistics at some point. This happens for everything, for example Tesla for years had the domain TeslaMotors.com, and look at Musk describing him getting Tesla.com: > "That took us 10 years to buy that Tesla.com domain," Musk said on the podcast. "That cost us like, $10 million." > Musk said in 2018 on Twitter that it actually cost $11 million, and took an "amazing amount of effort," to get the domain name off Grossman. So my overall conclusion from situations like that is, yes, we have to accept that while we're small, or even while we're "medium" we need to play by the rules for everyone else. If you grow up you don't have to. Daft Punk also had to put up with lots of bullshit in their first years, you gotta presume. They've earned this little victory of having no face on the Apple Music account... :) Creative artists tend to thrive on limitations. They use limitations to come up with inventive ways of expressing themselves despite and even through the limitations. So think about it like that, IMHO
  - echelon 5y ago
    I think you're apologizing for Apple. To Apple, this is a business to keep more of their customers locked into the Applesphere. As long as they're retained, they can tax all commerce associated with these people: apps, subscriptions, payments, media, etc. They're operating like a machine with a glazed and polished process. Apple doesn't love music or musicians. If they did, they wouldn't pull this shit.
wodenokoto 5y ago
> The spelling of an artist’s name must be correct and remain consistent across all content for that artist. However, some artists change names. Famously Prince, became "The artist formerly known as Prince" and then Prince again, but appears to only exist on iTunes/Apple Music as Prince. Meanwhile, Japanese artist Yumi Arai, changed her name to Yumi Matsutoya in 1976 after getting married and exists as two separate artists under former name and current name.
- Hamuko 5y ago
  I've seen a lot of artists that change either how their name is spelled or use a slightly differently name depending on the release. I've also seen some artists credit a song to be "X vs. Y", where X and Y were both different aliases of the same artist. There's also artists that have many names that they perform under. The eurobeat scene is one that brings to mind immediately, since Giancarlo Pasquini aka Dave Rodgers also performs under the names "Derek Simon", "Robert Stone", "Patrick Hoolley", "Mario Ross", "Red Skins", "RCS", "Aleph", "The Big Brother" and "Thomas & Schubert".
- onorton 5y ago
  A small technicality, but I don't think he ever released under the name "the artist formerly known as Prince" but as the Love Symbol [0]. An example album being the Gold Experience [1]. [0] https://compote.slate.com/images/39fd61d7-da5c-4975-aad4-84e5ff537438.jpg https://compote.slate.com/images/39fd61d7-da5c-4975-aad4-84e... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gold_Experience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gold_Experience
- wolverine876 5y ago
  So many edge cases ... If a performer changes to using a nickname, say from Robert Johnson to Bobby Johnson, should they be listed separately? If a band keeps the same personnel, music, etc. and changes only its name? What if they change one person, and the name change is for intellectual property reasons (e.g., the departed person owns rights to the original name)? What if they also were an acoustic folk band and plug in, switching to rock? To jazz? What if everything changes - personnel, music, etc. - except for the name? What if they retroactively rename the band or music for intellectual property reasons? ... as with every attempt to specify reality.
wolverine876 5y ago
I'd like music metadata that is universally compatible across systems and across time (e.g., 50 years from now). Is there any such standard? Apple's Style Guide is the most complete I've seen, which makes it useful - how closely does it match my needs? In limited experience, just about the only standard metadata was album, track title, and artist (I forget the names of the exact fields). Not only do I want more, that works terribly for classical music where the artist could be the composer Wagner, the Chicago Symphony, conductor Solti, various soloists, etc.
- Semaphor 5y ago
  You want ID3 tags [0], there is a composer and many more fields. They are supported by pretty much any media player. The only problem is that, as far as I know, there is no standard for multiple entries for a field (like artist) and delimiters might be different across software. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID3
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    I know about the ID3 format, but my understanding is that most fields aren't standardized.
    - Semaphor 5y ago
      There is a list of standardized fields, it’s pretty comprehensive [0], or you could look through the spec [1] which has additional comments. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID3#ID3v2_frame_specification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID3#ID3v2_frame_specification [1]: https://id3.org/id3v2.4.0-frames https://id3.org/id3v2.4.0-frames
      - wolverine876 5y ago
        Sorry, that was a poor choice of wording: I know about the spec; I mean that I understood that few fields are supported universally by music software (i.e., as usual, different people implement different parts of the spec).
chrisseaton 5y ago
> "Print this Document" Is this some kind of in-joke?
- arnon 5y ago
  I think it's the print version of this document
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    I wonder why it's in quotes.
    - inlikealamb 5y ago
      It's actually a machine for generating pointless comments on the internet.
- oneplane 5y ago
  No, this is a specific one-page render of the style guide that is normally part of the distributed software's Language Project bundle. The 'interactive' version is located here: https://help.apple.com/itc/musicstyleguide/ https://help.apple.com/itc/musicstyleguide/ The link "Print this Document" simply takes you to the single-page rendered version.
- jamamp 5y ago
  I looked at the print preview. It looks like when printing the web page, it includes section breaks for tidy formatting. Plus, the "Print this document" is hidden when printing. It looks like an instruction, but I'm not sure why it is in quotes.
Bud 5y ago
Oh, dear. There's a glaring style error in line 2 of this document. It has quotation marks around "Print this Document". For no reason. That's not what quotation marks are for. That's not how anything works. The rest of the document looks useful, though.
- gerjomarty 5y ago
  As pointed out by oneplane in a separate comment, it's because the link points to the print version. An interactive version exists at https://help.apple.com/itc/musicstyleguide/ https://help.apple.com/itc/musicstyleguide/ where the text is actually a link to the print version. I'll give you, it's a little odd that it even appears on the print version, but not the worst thing in the world.
- reaperducer 5y ago
  Oh, dear. There's a glaring style error in line 2 of this document. It has quotation marks around "Print this Document". For no reason. That's not what quotation marks are for. That's not how anything works. Oh, dear. There's a glaring style error in line 2 of this comment. It has the punctuation on the outside of the quotation marks for no reason. That's not how punctuation works. That's not how anything works. Protip: It should be "Print this Document." Period inside the quotation marks. People on the internet see other people putting it on the outside, and monkey-see-monkey-do spreads. But look at any professionally typeset document, and you'll see it in its correct position. (I hope you take this in the mirthful spirit in which it was intended. Also, Apple shouldn't have capitalized "Document," unless it was intended to be a subtitle. But I'm not sure what the purpose of that line is.)
  - Bud 5y ago
    Actually, if you check some style guides, you'll find that there is debate on this question. And rightly so.
  - TheAceOfHearts 5y ago
    Strongly disagree with editors that make this decision. I don't care what field they're professionals in, I think it's wrong. You end a sentence with a period. The quote is within the sentence. It doesn't make sense to update the quote. A quote may be a fragment, a sentence, or multiple sentences.
imwillofficial 5y ago
As an former open format DJ with terabytes of music, I would have killed for this type of unified, thoughtful, and comprehensive music organization spec.
- seabrookmx 5y ago
  This has existed since iTunes started selling music, and formats like DDEX have existed for a long time to communicate this metadata between labels, distributors, and retailers in a standard way. Sadly the metadata the consumer gets doesn't end up consistent because there's fragmentation between retailers (or if we're talking 10 years ago, p2p uploaders) on how to populate id3 tags etc.
sharkjacobs 5y ago
> 1.10. Emojis. Do not use emojis in titles, artist names, lyrics, or other metadata. I read this and thought that surely, in the year of our lord 2021, there must be a song or album title or even an artist name which is all emojis, how do they handle that? But it seems like this is a pretty standard limitation across the industry[1]. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/eamonnforde/2021/05/19/emoji-nal-rescue-coldplay-denied-use-of-emojis-as-song-titles/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/eamonnforde/2021/05/19/emoji-na...
- stewx 5y ago
  The rapper YB has a song called "Fire Emoji" https://open.spotify.com/track/5GAo1lngd23rtBxvyIJSca?si=2fecbcbf43c04295 https://open.spotify.com/track/5GAo1lngd23rtBxvyIJSca?si=2fe...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

40 points by gerjomarty 5y ago

Fun fact: I worked at a medium-sized music distributor, and Apple actually gives distributors a "score" based on how close they are to the style guide. If your score falls below a certain threshold the time between delivery of your content to Apple and when it goes on the store is delayed because of additional quality controls applied to your content. If you have a good score, it will go live immediately (assuming it's release date is in the past). Lots of software development at this company was driven directly by changes to this style guide, since iTunes / Apple music were such a huge portion of revenue.

PostThisTooFast 5y ago
And yet iTunes was (and is) a royal piece of shit that Apple bought, but couldn't even do what EphPod (unauthorized free iPod software on Windows) did.

paul7986 5y ago

The UX of Apple Music has always been shockingly bad as it's Apple. Most notable playing a playlist then going to play something else ..ugggh & omg! More detailed example... my friend sends me a link to their playlist .. i click it .. it starts playing then when im done listening to a few songs its time for me to say hey siri play something outside of the playlist. When I do Apple Music pops up this message saying do you want to keep the playlist queued .. with two options "keep," or "clear," what im done with playing it .. i want to hear another song without having to mess with my phone/read or understand a message while driving. Just save this playlist for me and ill go back and play it later ... horrible and dangerous UX(annoying when not driving)! Spotify is totally different and does as expected! A better UX is just play what I asked no stupid pop up and when I say Siri start XYZ playlist it re-starts it from beginning and or Hey Siri start XYZ playlist from last played song. That is a safer UX and isnt Apple Music usage 50% in the car? Interestingly i see im being downvoted and upvoted .. would enjoy hearing others thoughts! Had a fun arguement with a friend about this!

mttjj 5y ago
You're likely being downvoted not because your discussion is without merit but rather because it has nothing to do with the submitted link. The submitted link is a guide for how to format and submit metadata for music files submitted to Apple Music and the iTunes store. It has nothing to do with the consumer's UX.

drcongo 5y ago

I have music on Apple Music but no artist profile as Apple won't let me submit a picture without my face shown. Fine for Daft Punk though.

crooked-v 5y ago
I've seen a few fairly obscure theme bands on Apple Music that have primary photos including literal masks and the like. Are you sure you're running into 'picture without a face' and not rather 'picture not distinctively representing real people'?
historyloop 5y ago
People often get frustrated that the famous and the rich are treated differently, but it's literally logistics at some point. This happens for everything, for example Tesla for years had the domain TeslaMotors.com, and look at Musk describing him getting Tesla.com: > "That took us 10 years to buy that Tesla.com domain," Musk said on the podcast. "That cost us like, $10 million." > Musk said in 2018 on Twitter that it actually cost $11 million, and took an "amazing amount of effort," to get the domain name off Grossman. So my overall conclusion from situations like that is, yes, we have to accept that while we're small, or even while we're "medium" we need to play by the rules for everyone else. If you grow up you don't have to. Daft Punk also had to put up with lots of bullshit in their first years, you gotta presume. They've earned this little victory of having no face on the Apple Music account... :) Creative artists tend to thrive on limitations. They use limitations to come up with inventive ways of expressing themselves despite and even through the limitations. So think about it like that, IMHO
- echelon 5y ago
  I think you're apologizing for Apple. To Apple, this is a business to keep more of their customers locked into the Applesphere. As long as they're retained, they can tax all commerce associated with these people: apps, subscriptions, payments, media, etc. They're operating like a machine with a glazed and polished process. Apple doesn't love music or musicians. If they did, they wouldn't pull this shit.

wodenokoto 5y ago

> The spelling of an artist’s name must be correct and remain consistent across all content for that artist. However, some artists change names. Famously Prince, became "The artist formerly known as Prince" and then Prince again, but appears to only exist on iTunes/Apple Music as Prince. Meanwhile, Japanese artist Yumi Arai, changed her name to Yumi Matsutoya in 1976 after getting married and exists as two separate artists under former name and current name.

Hamuko 5y ago
I've seen a lot of artists that change either how their name is spelled or use a slightly differently name depending on the release. I've also seen some artists credit a song to be "X vs. Y", where X and Y were both different aliases of the same artist. There's also artists that have many names that they perform under. The eurobeat scene is one that brings to mind immediately, since Giancarlo Pasquini aka Dave Rodgers also performs under the names "Derek Simon", "Robert Stone", "Patrick Hoolley", "Mario Ross", "Red Skins", "RCS", "Aleph", "The Big Brother" and "Thomas & Schubert".
onorton 5y ago
A small technicality, but I don't think he ever released under the name "the artist formerly known as Prince" but as the Love Symbol [0]. An example album being the Gold Experience [1]. [0] https://compote.slate.com/images/39fd61d7-da5c-4975-aad4-84e5ff537438.jpg https://compote.slate.com/images/39fd61d7-da5c-4975-aad4-84e... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gold_Experience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gold_Experience
wolverine876 5y ago
So many edge cases ... If a performer changes to using a nickname, say from Robert Johnson to Bobby Johnson, should they be listed separately? If a band keeps the same personnel, music, etc. and changes only its name? What if they change one person, and the name change is for intellectual property reasons (e.g., the departed person owns rights to the original name)? What if they also were an acoustic folk band and plug in, switching to rock? To jazz? What if everything changes - personnel, music, etc. - except for the name? What if they retroactively rename the band or music for intellectual property reasons? ... as with every attempt to specify reality.

wolverine876 5y ago

I'd like music metadata that is universally compatible across systems and across time (e.g., 50 years from now). Is there any such standard? Apple's Style Guide is the most complete I've seen, which makes it useful - how closely does it match my needs? In limited experience, just about the only standard metadata was album, track title, and artist (I forget the names of the exact fields). Not only do I want more, that works terribly for classical music where the artist could be the composer Wagner, the Chicago Symphony, conductor Solti, various soloists, etc.

Semaphor 5y ago
You want ID3 tags [0], there is a composer and many more fields. They are supported by pretty much any media player. The only problem is that, as far as I know, there is no standard for multiple entries for a field (like artist) and delimiters might be different across software. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID3
- wolverine876 5y ago
  I know about the ID3 format, but my understanding is that most fields aren't standardized.
  - Semaphor 5y ago
    There is a list of standardized fields, it’s pretty comprehensive [0], or you could look through the spec [1] which has additional comments. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID3#ID3v2_frame_specification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID3#ID3v2_frame_specification [1]: https://id3.org/id3v2.4.0-frames https://id3.org/id3v2.4.0-frames
    - wolverine876 5y ago
      Sorry, that was a poor choice of wording: I know about the spec; I mean that I understood that few fields are supported universally by music software (i.e., as usual, different people implement different parts of the spec).

chrisseaton 5y ago

> "Print this Document" Is this some kind of in-joke?

arnon 5y ago
I think it's the print version of this document
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  I wonder why it's in quotes.
  - inlikealamb 5y ago
    It's actually a machine for generating pointless comments on the internet.
oneplane 5y ago
No, this is a specific one-page render of the style guide that is normally part of the distributed software's Language Project bundle. The 'interactive' version is located here: https://help.apple.com/itc/musicstyleguide/ https://help.apple.com/itc/musicstyleguide/ The link "Print this Document" simply takes you to the single-page rendered version.
jamamp 5y ago
I looked at the print preview. It looks like when printing the web page, it includes section breaks for tidy formatting. Plus, the "Print this document" is hidden when printing. It looks like an instruction, but I'm not sure why it is in quotes.

Bud 5y ago

Oh, dear. There's a glaring style error in line 2 of this document. It has quotation marks around "Print this Document". For no reason. That's not what quotation marks are for. That's not how anything works. The rest of the document looks useful, though.

gerjomarty 5y ago
As pointed out by oneplane in a separate comment, it's because the link points to the print version. An interactive version exists at https://help.apple.com/itc/musicstyleguide/ https://help.apple.com/itc/musicstyleguide/ where the text is actually a link to the print version. I'll give you, it's a little odd that it even appears on the print version, but not the worst thing in the world.
reaperducer 5y ago
Oh, dear. There's a glaring style error in line 2 of this document. It has quotation marks around "Print this Document". For no reason. That's not what quotation marks are for. That's not how anything works. Oh, dear. There's a glaring style error in line 2 of this comment. It has the punctuation on the outside of the quotation marks for no reason. That's not how punctuation works. That's not how anything works. Protip: It should be "Print this Document." Period inside the quotation marks. People on the internet see other people putting it on the outside, and monkey-see-monkey-do spreads. But look at any professionally typeset document, and you'll see it in its correct position. (I hope you take this in the mirthful spirit in which it was intended. Also, Apple shouldn't have capitalized "Document," unless it was intended to be a subtitle. But I'm not sure what the purpose of that line is.)
- Bud 5y ago
  Actually, if you check some style guides, you'll find that there is debate on this question. And rightly so.
- TheAceOfHearts 5y ago
  Strongly disagree with editors that make this decision. I don't care what field they're professionals in, I think it's wrong. You end a sentence with a period. The quote is within the sentence. It doesn't make sense to update the quote. A quote may be a fragment, a sentence, or multiple sentences.

imwillofficial 5y ago

As an former open format DJ with terabytes of music, I would have killed for this type of unified, thoughtful, and comprehensive music organization spec.

seabrookmx 5y ago
This has existed since iTunes started selling music, and formats like DDEX have existed for a long time to communicate this metadata between labels, distributors, and retailers in a standard way. Sadly the metadata the consumer gets doesn't end up consistent because there's fragmentation between retailers (or if we're talking 10 years ago, p2p uploaders) on how to populate id3 tags etc.

sharkjacobs 5y ago

> 1.10. Emojis. Do not use emojis in titles, artist names, lyrics, or other metadata. I read this and thought that surely, in the year of our lord 2021, there must be a song or album title or even an artist name which is all emojis, how do they handle that? But it seems like this is a pretty standard limitation across the industry[1]. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/eamonnforde/2021/05/19/emoji-nal-rescue-coldplay-denied-use-of-emojis-as-song-titles/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/eamonnforde/2021/05/19/emoji-na...

stewx 5y ago
The rapper YB has a song called "Fire Emoji" https://open.spotify.com/track/5GAo1lngd23rtBxvyIJSca?si=2fecbcbf43c04295 https://open.spotify.com/track/5GAo1lngd23rtBxvyIJSca?si=2fe...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]