Ben Lovejoy, writing for 9to5mac, uses iTunes on his Mac to dig into Apple Music.

The bad:

iTunes knows more about my musical tastes than my girlfriend. More than my neighbours, who have sometimes been more familiar with my musical tastes than they might wish. More than any of my friends – even the one who kindly ripped all my CDs for me on his high-end PC with multiple DVD drives.

Think about that for a moment. iTunes knows every single artist, album and track I own. Not only that, but it knows which ones I have put into what playlists. It even knows the exact number of times I have played every single track! And Apple uses none of that data in guiding its Apple Music suggestions. That really is a huge fail, given what could have been.

And the good:

Spotify has proven very, very good at learning which artists I like. It plays those artists a lot. A lot of a lot. Which is great for putting on a playlist and not having to touch it until complete. But not actually great for music discovery, as it only introduces me to a handful of new artists.

Apple Music, in contrast, has already introduced me to more than a dozen new artists that I really, really like. For someone whose tastes are decidedly non-mainstream, and very far removed from the Beats 1 fare that we have to assume represents Apple’s view of its primary target, that’s an impressive achievement.

The price of that has been a fair bit of skipping of artists I don’t like, but that’s the flipside of playing safe. If you don’t yet share my views of its ability to find great new artists, I highly recommend doing what I did and intensively schooling it, offering positive feedback on every single track you like.

Solid read.