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Apple Music isn’t for me; yet.

I tried out Apple Music’s three-month trial and figured out it’s not for me at this time.

The best part about Apple Music is being able to ask Siri to play anything. Having Apple Music right at your finger tips is fantastic. It’s also great when I can download any song and add it to all my playlists. No extra charges, no separate app, nothing but ease. This part, I really enjoyed. However, Apple Music really falls apart in two areas.

The first is Radio. Apple Music’s radio functionality is terrible. It should be just as good as Pandora, right? Not even close. You can create a new playlist based on any artist, but after that, you can’t customize it. You can’t say “never play this artist” or “include this artist.” It’s just ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ a song and see what Apple picks next.

The ability to pick good songs didn’t work for me either. Just because I liked a song by Kelly Clarkson doesn’t mean I want only hear female artists. And when we started a station off with a Disney song, we ended up getting a lot of slow older songs from soundtracks, not a lot of the current hits. Their algorithm was just bad. No matter what I tried, their Radio stations just weren’t enjoyable.

Turns out, you can’t delete radio stations you created either. In reality, this isn’t a huge issue, but I like to keep things cleaned up. If I don’t like a playlist, I want it gone. Why’s that so hard?

The second big issue is finding music. You’d think that since Apple has the iTunes Store, this would be easy right? Nope. Browsing Apple Music feels like a mess and browsing the iTunes Store is great. To bad they’re not connected at all. I ended up browsing the iTunes Store to find what I’d like listen to and then searching Apple Music for it. It’d be so much smoother if the pieces were connected. Find something in the iTunes Store and hit play to play it. Why isn’t it that easy?!

After my Apple Music trial, I have to say that Apple Music is in its infancy and hopefully Apple starts to fix some of these issues in future releases. I don’t think they’re too far from having a great product, I just don’t think it’s there yet. Not for me anyway.


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