I’ve dodged streaming services for a while now - in a musical sense - because I’ve always liked owning music. My LP collection way back when - dinosaurs and such - was more than extensive as well as my 45s. Switched to CDs and eventually to digital music. Fine.
But it’s pretty clear that the future is streaming and not a collection of files on my hard drive now. So tell me about Apple Music - since I’m an iPhone user.
I want to avoid ads. I hate advertising. It’s why I abandoned Pandora.
Does it allow me to build playlists? How does this work?
It makes recommendations? How does that function?
Can I share it with my kids so it’s one account per household?
Are the curated channels, like having a radio guy - I was one, once - play records and such?
Dragged, kicking and screaming, into the abyssal future…
I’ve heard nothing but bad things about Apple Music.
The problem with streaming services is that they’re splintering.
On the TV side now to stream every show I wanted I’d have to get Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Video, Google Chromecast, and the streaming subscriptions for HBO, Showtime, and CBS, and then I’d still need a cable subscription for Syfy’s current season.
It seems to me that music might head in a similar direction. You might have to subscribe to multiple services to get everything you want.
Really? I looove my Apple Music account. And this comes from a guy who looved my Spotify premium account before that, so it’s not like I have no other experience.
No ads
Build all the playlists you want. Subscribe to playlists that other people or curators have created. It works about like you’d imagine. Click on a song or album to add it to an existing playlist or to use to start a new playlist. Add and delete as you like.
It does make recommendations. You start off by picking some genres that you like. You then can narrow it down by selecting artists you like. Upon further use, it will start to accumulate information about songs, artists and albums you’ve actively liked or disliked in the app. It will then present a weekly new music playlist, a favorites list, and a large number of recommended albums, artists and curated playlists for you.
Maybe, if you want them to ruin your recommendations for you. Better to buy the family plan. Then everyone gets their own account.
Yeah, there’s the main Beats 1 radio station, a whole bunch of genre stations, then for each genre, there are numerous curated playlists refreshed every week, then there is a list of third party curators, like Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and so on.
It goes pretty deep. Mostly now, I just keep my weekly new music recommendations playlist on a loop. I’ve found a ton of great bands I’ve never heard of that way.
ETA: no need to use iTunes for any part of this either, except desktop music playing. I moved my legacy music library to a cloud backup and deleted it locally. I only stream now, minus a small subset of new stuff I keep synced to my iPhone and iPad for travel purposes.
There’s a free, three month trial. Easy enough to give it a shot.
You don’t have to use Apple Music if you have an iPhone. You can use Google Music or Amazon Music or Spotify or iHeartRadio.
I happen to use Amazon Music because I had already bought all of my digital music through Amazon, so my account was pretty full already. Then they made it so anything you’d bought on CD through them was also in your digital account. Then they put a bunch of music on Prime so it was free to grab with your Amazon Prime account. Now they’ve added a paid service that allows you access to a lot more music, but i haven’t used it.
You might want to search for “compare music streaming services” to read up on your choices to see what’s right for you.
I was dragged into Apple Music by my kid. Previously I managed my music library in iTunes and on my old school iPod. We got a family membership so it’s a shared membership, but we all have our own accounts. All my existing music was automatically moved to Apple Music and I can still use the iTunes client to manage it, plus I have access to the Apple Music library.
I do enough with it to play my music but not a lot more. You might get better answers from an actual expert, but I’m coming at it from the same position you are now.
> 1. I want to avoid ads. I hate advertising. It’s why I abandoned Pandora.
No ads with a membership.
> 2. Does it allow me to build playlists? How does this work?
Yes. I use iTunes to create playlists, but you can also use the Apple Music app. Create a playlist and drag stuff into it, or pick a song and choose what playlist(s) to add it to. You can also create playlists based on other criteria, like all songs from 1980-1989.
> 3. It makes recommendations? How does that function?
There’s a “For You” section in the app that lists recommendations based on songs you listen to, songs you’ve marked as liking or disliking, and based on your initial profile where you optionally tell it what artists and genres you like.
> 4. Can I share it with my kids so it’s one account per household?
Yes (although it’s one membership; everyone has their own account).
> 5. Are the curated channels, like having a radio guy - I was one, once - play records and such?
Yup, there are a couple free ad-free stations available to anyone, plus a bunch of ad-free stations for Apple Music members. Some stations are curated by Apple Music editors, others are genre-based. You can create your own stations like in Pandora based on songs or artists.
To expand a bit, here’s why I ditched Spotify when Apple Music arrived: Siri. As an iDevice user, my number 1 feature is telling Siri what to play while in my car or on my motorcycle. Apple really doesn’t seem to want to let the other streaming options integrate with Siri, so that’s my only option for now.
Another vote for Amazon Music. For years I used Apple Music/iTunes. When I bought music through Amazon, they had a nice utility that moved the songs into iTunes for you. They changes Apple has made in the last few years have made it horrid in my opinion. Lately all they seem to do is push me to put everything in their cloud, for which I have to pay, instead of storing it on my device, where I can use it, say when I’m on an airplane without WiFi (which happens all to frequently). When they started making it nearly impossible for me to download songs that I had purchased to my device, I was done.
I do everything with Amazon Music now. I had already purchased a lot with them, and they’ll let you move your Apple Music lists over as well. They’ll also stream different “stations” if you feel like listening to something other than your own playlists. They give you the option whether to download music or keep it in their cloud and it’s very easy to do either (unlike Apple). I’ve been very happy with Amazon. All of this is with Apple devices - iPad, and iPhone.
My go to is iTunes internet radio. There are hundreds of classifications, and each class has hundreds of stations to choose from. Many of them don’t talk.
I’ve been using Rhapsody (now Napster) for years. Love it.
I can download playlists and albums to my device to listen to offline.
They have customizable radio channels. Very much like Pandora.
No ads. At all.
I have one account, but my kids all use it, too.
Isn’t there something about Apple Music that takes the music files on your computer and uploads them to their cloud? Something like that? I understand that if you have original music you recorded or purchased from an independent artist, it uploads it and changes it to something that matches what they have, not the original thing. I could be totally off base, though.
A friend of mine has a subscription to Apple Music. He adores it. Every year he has a music party at his house. A week prior to the party he publishes a series of questions, for instance, “Your favorite wedding reception dance song” or “A song you love that will surprise everyone”, or “A song you love in a genre you hate”.
We all drink to excess while he announces and plays the songs. In three years, hundreds of songs, Apple Music has never missed one, including some really obscure ones.
I listen to Pandora, no membership, no ads. What am I doing wrong?
Downside of Pandora – too parochially American. There are Chinese artists whose YouTube hits are hundreds of millions, and Pandora has never heard of them. But they do have some African artists.
My experience with Pandora also included truly short playlists. It’s like they didn’t have licenses for enough music so I kept hearing the same things over and over.
Google Play Music user here. Love it. I won’t try to talk you out of Apple Music if that’s what you want to use. I will give one piece of advice, though. All of the streaming music services basically do the same thing - millions of songs, ad free (if you pay), playlists, curated radio stations, etc. Try the free trial of all of them and choose the one you like best.
Former iPod user here. I decided not to get another itouch for three reasons:
iPods with enough memory to hold all my music cost $400
and
music you buy on itunes is only playable on apple devices. I bought an album on itunes that I can’t listen to now because I can’t put it on my non-apple phone.
also
whatever version of ipods you have, it’s pretty much obselete within 2 years. This doesn’t affect your music, but you won’t be able to download new games. So if you’re going for a 64gb pod to hold all your music, you’ll need $400 every 2 years to stay current with it…
However I do have a few tips:
You can rip your own cd’s into mp3’s and transfer them to your ipod (make sure you use a rip method that ipod recognizes). That way you have a physical cd that you can re-rip when/if different and better ripping techniques become common.
You can, as others have said, buy music from amazon and other sources and transfer those to your pod. I know the last 3-4 amazon cd’s I bought, Amazon mailed me the cd and also let me download the mp3 version of the cd as soon as I bought it. Which was nice.
Also, rather than buying music videos from itunes, I would download videos from youtube, save them on the comp, then transfer them to the ipod. Again, you have to have an ipod compatible version of the videos.
Re: Pandora, I’ve found that as you give more thumbs up and down to songs, the playlist shrinks. It seems like it can’t reconcile your varied tastes so it tends to default to only songs you like. If you go with only a thumbs up or only a thumbs down approach, the stations have more variety. But I still find the selection is more limited on Pandora than on Apple Music.
This used to be not quite accurate. Close, but kludgeable. I am not sure if it is still the case, but, if you have a computer, you can burn songs to a cd and reimport the track into iTunes (or some other ripper) with the drm gone. Because, CDs have no drm. If you use RW CDs, you might be able to erase and reburn several times. If you have bought a lot of music, it will be a chore, though.