I use the “Like” system in my music services all the time because I want it to learn from my listening habits and be more personalized for my tastes. However, it seems that every service uses this system in different ways, so I talked to Apple about how you should use likes with Apple Music.
First, let me tell you one of my big problems, or sources of confusion, with likes on streaming services. Let’s say I’m listening to a Metal station and a great song comes on, but I consider it to be Rock. Do I like it? I enjoy the song, but I’m afraid if I like it, more Rock songs will come on the Metal station, diluting it.
What if I don’t like it? Will it never show up again, even in Rock? Perhaps I should skip it, but is that equivalent to a “dislike”? These are the questions and concerns I had as I listened to Apple music.
So, here’s some guidance on what you should be doing.
Apple’s built in Radio stations are all handpicked songs. They are handpicked with a thought to what song is playing and what song comes after it. By doing this curation, Apple strives to make one song flow into the other so, hopefully, you won’t need to skip songs—or at least skip less often.
When you play a radio song, you will notice a heart—this is the like button. If you tap the heart, indicating you like that song, it does absolutely nothing to “tune” that station. Since the stations are human curated, there is no need for a tuning algorithm.
Tapping the heart does affect “For You,” the section of Apple Music that’s custom built with playlists, albums and songs tailored to your individual tastes. For You also takes into account music you add to your library and full plays you listen to. Skips aren’t really taken into account, because there are so many reasons you may skip a song—maybe you’re just not in the mood for it right now.
You can further tune the For You section. If you go to For You and there is a recommendation for an album that you just don’t like, tap and hold on the album. A menu will popup where you can choose “I Don’t Like This Suggestion,” allowing Apple Music to further learn about your musical taste.
Now, If you build a station yourself by searching for a band or song and tap “Start Station,” you’ll notice the heart changes to a star. In this instance, you can tune the station to your likes and dislikes.
Tapping the star gives you a “Play More Like This” or “Play Less Like This.” These choices can be made on a per station basis without worrying that you are affecting your overall enjoyment of a particular song or band.
Using these tips should give you finely tuned For You section and enjoyable custom radio listening experience in Apple Music.
Siri is a novelty. Siri is incredibly useful. Both of these things are true.
Whenever a new, funny answer to a Siri query (hey, it rhymes!) emerges, it is sure to make its way around the internet. One fine example is in this tweet from Aaron Paul:
Ask Siri “what is zero divided by zero?” RIGHT. NOW.
If you haven’t already, go ahead, it’s a fun answer. Not useful, but novel and funny. Most importantly, like all Easter eggs, finding and sharing this draws you in, builds a bond between you and Siri and, between you and the Apple ecosystem.
This same logic applies with useful queries as well. For example, try asking Siri this:
Play the top songs from 1970
Feel free to pick your favorite year. If you have Apple Music installed, Siri will reply with:
Now playing the top 25 songs from 1970…
and will build a playlist of the Billboard top 25 from that year, edited (of course) to include songs in the Apple Music collection.
Super useful, incredibly fun.
Which brings us to The Beatles. There is a gaping hole in Apple Music. A Beatles-sized hole. Ask Siri for the top songs of, say, 1964. You’ll get songs from 1964, certainly, but no songs by The Beatles, who OWNED the top of the charts back then. If you search Apple Music, you’ll get lots of Beatles music, but it’s always instrumentals and other covers.
A friend of mine who knows about such things, suggested that the agreement between Apple and Capitol Records is what’s known in the industry as an EBTB agreement. Everything But The Beatles. Here’s hoping that gets fixed.
Want to request a song on Beats 1? Here’s a list of country-based request line phone numbers.
Interesting that Apple is going old school on this. Since Apple already has solid data on what is popular, it seems to me this is about capturing audio snippets they can play on the air. Which is also old school. Think Casey Kasem and song request shout outs.
I tried texting to the US line and got this response:
Thanks for texting the Beats 1 request line. We want to hear your voice! Please call us to leave a request. Thanks!
Interestingly, the phone was not on iMessage (it was green instead of blue).
One of the Beats 1 hosts, Travis Mills, posted this tweet:
Heading to @Beats1 LA & will be taking requests today! Hit me with a voice message at [email protected] & listen to me on @AppleMusic.
I texted a request to [email protected]. It is blue (as you would expect from an iCloud addy) and goes through with no response. Could be specific to Travis Mills’ show, could be a general request dropbox. I’ve not found an official mention of this address, so not clear yet who is monitoring the address.
June 30, 2015
Some scattered thoughts on the first day with Apple Music.
First things first, the thought that keeps coming back to me is this: We are all listening to the same station, to the same DJ, to the same music. We are all experiencing the Apple Music and Beats 1 launch together. In unison. This is a remarkable experience.
The first tick of Apple Music was Apple’s release of iOS 8.4. I got it pretty early in the process, so the download and install took just a few minutes, but my sense is that folks who came along even an hour after the release took as much as an hour to get through the process. To be expected. The Apple Music launch was a major event and everyone was forced to go through the upgrade in order to participate.
With iOS 8.4 installed I fired up my Music app, tapped the Beats 1 Listen Now button, immediately heard Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports. This is clearly music for the holding pen, for folks waiting for the show to begin. In fact, this experience felt very much like sitting in the room at WWDC, waiting for the keynote to start.
There was a bit of mic chatter, then Zane Lowe broke in to make the official launch:
Alright, man. We gotta kick this whole thing off at some point. We spent the last three months trying to build this radio station and now we can build no more. We must launch.
We’ve had all sorts of ideas about the first song, things that have made statements, things with fanfare, but ultimately, there’s been one song that people keep coming back to. We’ve tested sound to it, I’ve referred to it lyrically when I needed a boost, cause it’s been stressful at times, you know, and exciting and challenging. We’ve even cut demos to it to convince people to continue to support this radio station.
This band put this EP together a few months ago, with little or no fanfare outside of core fans. But they’re building. That’s exactly the kind of story, the kind of record, we need to kick this whole thing off with.
Cause man, it’s not about fanfare. That’s fireworks and a hangover the next day. It’s about quality and consistency.
We’re Beats 1. We’re worldwide. And from now on, we’re always on.
And with that, Beats 1 was on the air. First song: City, by Manchester’s Spring King.
And Twitter came alive.
A lot of people I followed, as well as folks who followed me, were listening to the launch, sharing this experience. People around the world. It was truly amazing.
I can’t help but think that Apple has unleashed something important here, a vital addition to the ecosystem. With your upgrade to iTunes 12.2, which came out Tuesday afternoon, you can now listen to Beats 1 and Apple Music on your Mac, on your iPhone, via your Apple Watch and, this fall, on an Android device, if that’s your thing.
One final thought. Is this the end game for Apple Music, or just the beginning? Will Apple use Beats 1 as a base, adding new stations focused on different genres, a la Sirius/XM?
Whatever their next move, this was an incredible start for Apple Music.
On Monday afternoon, I went to Apple’s campus to meet with Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services, and Beats Founder, Jimmy Iovine, to talk about Apple Music.
Apple is heading into a streaming market filled with competitors. For the first time in many years, Apple is doing something in the music market where it is not the de facto leader. However, competitors didn’t determine what Apple would do with its new service.
“We certainly pay attention to what competitors are doing, but I’m never losing any sleep on competitors,” said Cue. “I don’t have any control over what they do—what I have control over is what we do. We’ve spent all of our time and energy thinking about what it is we want to build.”
There are a lot of different components to Apple Music. Some existing from iTunes, others integrated from Beats. These are the pieces that Apple needed to put together to make Apple Music stand out from everyone else.
“If you define the service by the fact there’s 30 million songs you can play, they’re all the same,” said Cue. “It doesn’t matter which one you get. It can never be just about that, there has to be more.”
So, it’s not the sheer number of songs, but the ways the service presents and uses those songs to give the user what they want—great music.
“One of the things we wanted with Apple Music was depth, said Cue. “We wanted you to be immersed in it when you started using it. Jimmy, Trent, myself, and others would go in a room—we argued a lot, we fought a lot, and we’re still doing it. We’re doing it on a few things we can change on this version.”
When I asked Cue how he would try to convince people that Apple Music was better than competing services, he said, “Ultimately, you can’t convince them, it’s just got to be better.”
Well said.
Curation in Apple Music
The whole concept of curation that made Beats playlists so popular is not only a part of Apple Music, it’s also a part of Apple Music Radio, as well.
Cue and Iovine explain that Apple Music Radio is hand programmed now. Curators choose the songs and how those songs relate to other songs. It’s not a playlist, but by doing the radio component of Apple Music like this, you can get songs from multiple genres coming together in a way that you wouldn’t have before.
Iovine said that when he hears an algorithm choose songs for a Bruce Springsteen channel, for example, he can pretty much guess what’s going to be played. Bob Seger, John Mellencamp, and Tom Petty are always popular choices.
As he pointed out, most algorithms leave you stuck in an era, and stuck in a particular sound. However, Apple Music, Iovine argues, provides a much richer and broader range of music. He went back to the Springsteen example.
“What freaked me out is that Apple Music played ‘Paint It Black,’ which I happen to know is one of Springsteen’s favorite Stones songs,” said Iovine.
Jimmy said that he is constantly calling the curators with suggestions on how to make the service better. Obviously, he’s very familiar with many of the components of Apple Music because they came from Beats.
However, not everything can be done by hand.
“We’re trying to bring the best of both worlds,” said Cue. “You can’t do everything humanly curated, and you can’t do everything with algorithms. We have what we believe is the best of both.”
As part of the Apple Music launch, the Beats service will cease operation, but not right away.
“The Beats accounts will migrate. We won’t do that automatically, but we’ll have a Beats app update that will walk you through it,” said Cue. “Beats will continue to work for a few months while the migration happens.”
The good news is that all of the content you’ve collected using Beats will migrate over to Apple Music. That’s great news for Beats subscribers, like me, because I have some great playlists that I’ll want to keep.
Beats 1 Radio
Jimmy shocked me a bit when he said, “Radio is massive.” I considered radio to be like magazines—steadily going downhill for the last decade or so. However, Iovine said that 270 million people in America still listen to radio, adding jokingly, “I didn’t think there were that many people that had a radio.”
Cue and Iovine explained that the problem with radio was not the fact that people didn’t like it, but rather that too much advertising and radio station research into what songs were popular was flawed. Songs that weren’t popular right away were pulled, based on research, so you listen to the radio and hear the same songs all the time.
As Cue pointed out, Technology limited the ads, but it also eliminated the DJ, something many people enjoyed.
“As part of this ecosystem, what if there was a station that didn’t have any of those rules and didn’t serve any of those masters,” said Iovine. “What if it just took anything that was exciting, whether it be on Connect or a new record out of Brooklyn or Liverpool.”
“Or whether it was rock or hip hop,” added Cue.
So one of those genres could literally follow the other on Beats 1 Radio.
“It works,” said Iovine. “And it works because the DJ is in the middle explaining how it works. DJs give you context.”
So what does Beats 1 Radio compete with? Nothing, according to Iovine.
“It doesn’t compete with anything that’s out there because there’s never been anything like this,” said Iovine.
Measuring the success of Apple Music
Ultimately, Apple Music will be judged to be successful, or not. Jimmy’s definition of success was focused on the art of music.
“If it moves culture and helps move music forward. I think it’s going to be good for music,” said Iovine. “I had money, now I have more money. It can’t be about the money. Moving popular culture is so much more important than money—that’s what at stake here. I made Beats because I love what they [Apple] do. Everything I’ve done since 2003 has come from Apple. Everything.”
For Eddy Cue, one of Apple’s top executives, the customer experience is one of the top considerations.
“I know how we’ll will judge it, and we know how others will judge it. Obviously, over time others will judge it by the numbers, but that’s not the way we’ve ever judged our products. The numbers are the end result. The way we judge it is are people loving and having an experience with it that’s better than anything they thought was possible. If that’s the case, the numbers always come out in the end.”
