Fine-tuning Apple Music’s “My Favorites Mix”

A couple of weeks ago, Apple Music added a new feature call My Favorites Mix to the For You section of the music service. This uses an algorithm to add songs to a weekly updated playlist, which is based on the music you play and love and other music Apple believes you will like. My list has been great, but you can help yourself and fine-tune it to be even better.

The easiest way to tell Apple the music you enjoy is to “Love” a song. In iOS you can do that in a number of ways, including tapping the “…” on the Now Playing page and then tap Love. This is a clear indication to the service that you want to hear more songs like the currently playing track.

I use the Love feature every chance I get so Apple Music and the For You section will always be in tune with my specific musical tastes. Apple outlined the advantages to doing this in an article on BuzzFeed earlier this week:

deep historical knowledge of individual users’ tastes and habits, based on years of data carried over from iTunes.

If you gave high ratings to a song or album in your old iTunes library, or just played it a lot more than others, you’ll find that behavior reflected in your My Favorites Mix.

This is good information to know, but it also brings up a slight problem for many users, including for me.

You used to be able to Love a song directly from the lock screen on the iPhone. With iOS 10, Apple took away that feature, which means that instead of tapping on the lock screen and then tapping Love, you know have to unlock your phone; open Apple Music; go to the Now Playing screen; tap “…” and then tap Love.

While Apple says that ratings are also important, they have completely removed ratings from the iOS version of Apple Music. You can still go to your Mac and rate songs, but not everyone is going to do that. I do.

Clearly you can’t Love songs while you’re driving or doing some other tasks, so I always looked back in the history of music that had been played and catch up on the songs I wanted to Love. Sadly, Apple removed the history feature from Apple Music on iOS as well, so you can’t do that.

Removing features like that seems counter-productive to what Apple wants you to do to improve the service, and how the service gets better for individual listeners.

Still, if you want to improve the My Favorites Mix, Love the songs you love. You will notice an improvement.