Yesterday, we posted an article titled, Apple Music and the loss of the album.
As a result of that discussion, I became aware of this post from a few month’s ago, a piece by Dave B on pain points in the iOS 11 Music app.
Dave does a nice job digging through Apple’s music experience, and I hope that folks on the Apple Music team take a few minutes to read through this post, if they haven’t already. Some terrific food for thought.
I have an idea for a music app to replace Apple’s. It’s called “Masterlist”. It’s kind of based around the idea of playlists on steroids. So say your a Zeppelin fan. You pick Zeppelin and you get a curated Led Zeppelin experience. All the albums. A bunch of playlists. Hard rocking songs, acoustic songs, etc. The forgettable songs are dropped or displayed in such a way that indicates they suck but if you like it you bump it up. The master list for Zeppelin is a curated, sequenced playlist of the best of their entire catalogue. Listen to in sequence or shuffle like a normal playlist. There would be a “Sunday morning” playlist of all Zeppelins acoustic stuff and medium tempo songs. Then other bands you subscribe to also have a “Sunday morning” playlist and you can choose to play a “Masterlist” of “Sunday morning” music.
Also it recognizes songs like “Heartbreaker” & “Living, Loving Maid” and plays them as one song.
My biggest Moment of Stupid with Apple’s music is Siri’s tune identification.
Ask “What song is this?” and Siri will have a little listen, then identify it with Shazam. But when it tells you “I know that tune, it’s ___!” the button beside is Play not Add.
I’m already listening to the song, hoss. Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to point the phone at it.
Add would actually be useful.
This is a moment where Apple clearly had no user scenario in mind.
I disagree with his point about recommendations. I know what I like, I want to find stuff I might like that I don’t know about.
I wish they’d put some type of liner notes or credits with albums too.