An Apple Music plea

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News came today that Apple is planning a major revamp of Apple Music at its Worldwide Developer Conference in June. This is welcome news for sure. While the service has improved considerably since its introduction, there are still some things that need to addressed—hopefully, this is it.

However, there are some lessons I hope Apple learned from last year’s introduction.

So Apple:

Leave the celebrities at home

This is a developer conference, not a gala event where you can show off all the celebrities you know in the industry. Don’t talk to the first two rows of the audience like you did last year—talk to the 5,000 developers that paid to be there and the millions of customers watching from home.

Listening to Drake stumble his way through a speech about how great Apple is does nothing to help your cause with Apple Music. Most people in that room don’t care—or we don’t care as much as you seem to—we want to see a product that works.

Focus on the product

Showing two dozen screenshots of Pharrell also does nothing for your audience. That crowd wants to hear about the product and how you’ve improved it. They want to know about the APIs that are going to help them build products.

Apple is a great product company, but the first version of Apple Music chipped away a lot of trust people had—that will be difficult to get back, but with a laser focus on the product, it can be done.

Be honest

I think we can be honest and admit you released Apple Music when it wasn’t ready. There were just too many bugs for it to be any other way, but you did it regardless.

Developers and consumers want to know you heard us—that you took our criticisms to heart and you fixed the problems.

I don’t mind a public beta of Apple Music that is being worked on, but don’t walk on that stage and tell me it’s a finished, working product if it isn’t.

The amount of trust and loyalty you’ll lose with another round of broken Apple Music will be mind boggling.

Beauty and respect

Ultimately, we want to see the same dedication you have for your hardware products brought to Apple Music. Hardware works. It’s beautifully designed, elegant, and thoughtful. That’s what you need to show us with Apple Music at WWDC.

Show your developers, customers, and musicians the respect they deserve. We’re paying for this service and we want it to work. We will support your efforts to make it the best service in the world.

Just don’t take us for granted again.



  • Just please please please kill off iTunes and break it into individual apps. If you want to fix Apple Music you have to start there.

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  • StruckPaper

    Take Cue and Jimmy Iovine out of the management of it.

  • “If you see an Iovine onstage, they blew it.”

  • Philip Smith

    I am still rebuilding my iTunes library a year after Apple Music nuked it and have about 500 CD’s to rip still – mostly multi disc compilations. It will be a very long time before I make that mistake again.

    • Caleb Hightower

      Same here, my 2,500+ CD collection was irrevocably damaged thanks to their ‘upgrade’ (more like a downgrade). Not to mention all the content not on CD and not from iTunes that I lost.

      Had to create a whole new account just for Apple Music and I left my music ‘vault’ segregated

      Apple’s approach to ‘one app to rule them all’ is not a wise strategy IMPO.

    • rick gregory

      One word:

      Backups.

      • A few more: no nonsense, free, reliable backup on Google Play Music.

        Screw the iTunes Match tax and all the “upgrade” horror stories it rode in on.

        • rick gregory

          Sure, if you want to. I think you get my point though, right? People who say they have tons of music and it’s super valuable to them… but who don’t routinely backup? Please.

  • Caleb Hightower

    One more plea, kick Eddie off the design team, please.

  • niyat

    It should not be announced in WWDC keynote.

    The fact that Apple reserved a different venue makes me think they are not listening.

  • ebernet

    For me Apple Music was not workable until it supported > 25,000 tracks (I have 53,000). When I turned it on in late October after the limit was raised to 100,000, it did a terrible job of matching my music, rendering half of my live concerts useless to listen to by randomly substituting studio and other live versions for what was supposed to be there… And it even screwed up studio work by substituting live versions of songs in the middle of concept studio albums. After resetting my iCloud Music Library a month ago (After having my bug reporter bug flagged as fixed), and having it then upload only a 1/5th of what it had uploaded last time, I was worried – but lo and behold it had actually REALLY analyzed what I had and it realized that about 5k tracks were wrong and just uploaded those Since then, I have not had ONE incorrectly played song. But now I am worried. Will they screw this all up again? What I want out of the next version of Apple Music is an easier way to navigate MY library of music (it is all shoved into my music and badly navigable), and the holy grail, give me handoff with my music…

    • This is promising. Thank you for the input, Ebernet. I am about ready to pull the trigger on the Apple Music Family Plan to combine my wife’s and my collections. I’ve held off because several of her songs did get matched wrong and I have a ton of my own music in my iTunes (originals done mostly via Garageband). Who knows what Apple Music would try to match them to?

      If it analyzed yours correctly, then maybe it’ll be fine for me to go for it. (Overall, I don’t have near the number of songs you have.)

    • oldwhig

      Apple needs to provide users with the option to “override” it’s so-called “Matching,” and simply allow us to upload music to the cloud. I have a number of albums that iTunes Match has ruined by matching my fine copies with the store’s flawed one (skips/cut-offs/blips and other flaws). Inexcusable.

  • Mo

    Put away the coke spoon, Eddie.

  • Prof. Peabody

    My Plea: Make the Music app useable for those of us that don’t subscribe to Apple Music.

    I want to play my music on my phone just like always, I don’t see why I have to be bombarded with advertisements. I want an app that lets me manage my music on my device not use a program that’s entirely devoted to online streaming, (when I’m not in fact streaming). I want an app where “album view” actually just shows the albums I’ve synced to my device.

    If I ever subscribe to Apple Music, then I would want the Music app to reflect that but since I don’t, and don’t anticipate ever doing so, I just want the Music app to let me manage my music on my device, just as it always did.

    Literally three quarters of the Music apps UI is only devoted to the streaming product and becomes useless for those of us that don’t subscribe.

    • Well said. Amen.

    • Loving my “I only fewer things, but do ’em OK and never screw you up” free subs on IHeartRadio, Spotify, Google Play, and the “unmusic” Rhapsody semi-premium sub T-Mob gives me.

      iTunes – whose Windows version is what made me into a Mac switcher – is now in my rear-view mirror, and missin’ it not a whit….

  • bjwanlund

    Killing iTunes and breaking it into individual apps would be a start. Maybe then we’ll get lyrics to return in iOS (insert name of next iteration here).

  • oldwhig

    Good thoughts here.

    I remember one that, in one of his last keynotes, Steve introduced the new Apple TV by explaining how much Apple had learned from the first one. That would be a good approach here as well: explain, with honesty and humility, what you learned from the first year of Apple Music and how the new edition reflects that learning.

  • I don’t get all the Apple Music rage. I have it from launch day. it works. seems simple enough.

    I know Jim somehow lost some music and didn’t have a backup for some other reason, but come on. don’t push your event onto everybody else…I have no trust issues here.