From Reddit:
What does everyone do to find new good music on AM? I’ve been having to use Spotifys discover and recommendations to get good music.
I prefer Apple Music to Spotify interface and usability wise but I really wish they would just up their algorithm game for discovering new songs or getting good songs based off “stations” I create based off a song I’m listening to. I sometimes get songs I already have or very mainstream options like Justin Biebers “No Brainer” come up and it’s like wow Apple lol
Here’s one response:
You need to put in a LOT of work to get Apple Music to work for you.
What Apple Music would like is that you select the genres and artists that you like when you set your account, listen to the stuff from your library or tracks suggested by For You and have Music do the rest. This works well if you only listen to mainstream stuff but falters if you look for artists with smaller listener counts (i.e. most of my library).
To fix this, you have to “Love” and “Dislike” a lot of songs yourself. For example, Music kept recommending Hip Hop for me (it’s probably the most popular genre on the platform); I had to dislike every Hip Hop song it threw my way for it to stop doing that. I also like Midwest Emo Pop Punk; most artists in that category are relatively unknown, so I had to import my Discover Weekly playlists for a few weeks and upvote songs from that to train Music to find artists like this for me. Apple Music’s For You didn’t get “good” until I spent roughly two weeks doing this. My New Music Mix is almost on par with Spotify’s Discover Weekly now, and I’m even getting Artist Spotlights from artists I didn’t think they did Spotlights on (like The Descendants).
The only issue I’m having now is that I’m scared to listen to hip hop on Music since I feel like it will begin recommending all sorts of Trap if I listen to even one or two songs (which I do sometimes; I like to stay current on the genre even though I don’t like it much).
I agree with all of the above, but I have found one path to music discovery that works well for me.
Recently, Apple Music introduced the Friends Mix to the top of the For You page. When I first fired up the Friends Mix, it was a bland rehash of my favorites. It was fine, but there was nothing really new to discover.
The key was adding new friends. Once I started sharing my Apple Music name (I embedded it in a tweet, which I pinned) and started following everyone who followed me, my friends list grew and my Friends Mix started getting interesting, much more enjoyable.
SIDE NOTE: My Apple Music name is ZZDAVE and I make every effort to follow all followers. Follow me and help me grow my Friends Mix.
As to liking and disliking songs, one tip is to let Siri do all the heavy lifting. Hear a song you like? Fire up Siri and say “I love this”. Siri will tap that heart for you. Same for “I dislike this”.
Everything in the Browse section is completely irrelevant to me, today. One would think that Apple’s machine learning could offer up some new music that would I find interesting, rather than just push the latest pop album. Yes, I’m aware there’s a For You section.
I’m a heavy classical music listener, and there’s not one classical album on the Browse page. If I dive into Classical in Genres there are 10 new albums that would be more relevant to me than anything on the Browse landing page. So Apple’s “curated” sorting on Browse does nothing to help me find music I actually want to listen to.
Oh, and Apple, if I “Dislike” an album on the Browse landing page, just remove it. It’s highly unlikely I’ll change my mind. So put something in it’s place that’s more relevant when I refresh.
I’ve had a lot better luck finding new and interesting blues & bluegrass on Bandcamp. Much less work.
This is really the missing piece of Apple Music. Having the huge library is great, but without it being easily discoverable it largely goes to waste.
This from Caleb: “…just remove it.” It’s such an obvious feature, I simply can’t understand why it hasn’t been implemented yet. Same goes for individual songs in generated playlists. At the very least it would signal that Apple Music is learning from what we input.
But it goes so much further. I’ve been a subscriber since day one and although I HAVE discovered new music I actually like, it’s a constant uphill battle to prevent Apple Music from proposing stuff I not only dislike, but HATE. I get pop songs even if Pop is actively disabled in my profile. I recently saw an album as part of my favourites mix that was literally tagged DISLIKE. I cannot understand how this even happens programmatically: step one, look at dislikes; step two, don’t include dislikes. Isn’t this basic?
The other point of contention is mentioned in the article: a fear of listening. As hard as it is to train Apple Music on what I’m looking for, it seems incredibly easy to derail the entire process by simply listening to “other” music. This weekend I played an old French music playlist on Sonos—it felt like the right mood. Now, every single day I get an album from Charles Trenet or Edith Piaf. This is a single listen of a playlist, one time. It shouldn’t suddenly override my preferences. And for the record, I have “Musique Francophone” as a “dislike” in my initial profile (nothing against it at all but I kept getting pop or mainstream quebecois artists that had NOTHING to do with my musical tastes).
Bottom line: it’s frustrating. It’s frustrating that Apple seems unable to implement a true analysis of what we enjoy, given the wealth of information it has access to. It’s frustrating that they seem unable to analyze much of anything beyond simple playback—music has inherent sonic properties, scales, rhythms…all of this should be processed by that vaunted machine learning we keep hearing about.
But hell…when Apple Music can’t even exclude a disliked artist or album from a mix called Favourites…we have a long way to go don’t we?
I had been building a “loved” song playlist for years. It’s about 39 hours long now and I originally started building it just so I could just let something play while I work in the garage. But now that I’ve subscribed to Apple Music, I guess it uses all those songs to judge my taste because I don’t have any problems finding great music. I just tell Siri “play some heavy rock” or “Play (bandname) Radio” and I’ll get hours worth of killer tracks with only a few I have to skip. I’ve found a lot of good music this way and have never had a song come on that was out of context.
I’ll say too that the curated “A-Lists” playlists are dynamite. Whenever I want something new, they are my go-to.
And since we’re sharing profiles, here’s mine: https://itunes.apple.com/profile/DanaPellerin
I haven’t had nearly the trouble everyone else seems to have. I routinely go mark things as Liked or Disliked.
For You: Playlists shows 3/6 that are what I like, 1/6 meh, 2/6 stupidly wrong. Albums: All relevant, tho it’s very ’80s pop heavy today. Artist Spotlight: 6/6 exactly in genre for me. Favorites Mix looks all good, heavily liked; a bit of whiplash going from Front Line Assembly going to Concrete Blonde, but machines aren’t good DJs. Chill Mix has some stuff I like and some modern whinging emo shit. New Music Mix is doing a good job of picking mostly metal and industrial, looks like; there’s not enough new blues to show up I think.
The Browse tab is exactly like 30 years ago when you’d walk into a record store. Up front is a bunch of “popular” garbage for morons, then you go back to the genre racks and there’s the good stuff.
What I do want is the ability to kill certain artists. If I mark Taylor Swift or Drake as “Dislike”, I don’t ever want those hate-crimes against hearing to ever be visible for me, in any playlist, any search, any mix. I’ve filed feedback with Apple to this effect, and like all Apple feedback it’s a black hole.
This is mostly irrelevant to the post, but I want to complain that Apple mostly-removed* the “New from your Artists” section in the iTunes store.
Because why would they remove that? That ought to be a top-level thing you can see a whole page of, honestly.
(* Mostly, because sometimes it randomly shuffles in to the bottom of the main page.
Of course, half the time it’s stuff I have no interest in and that Apple ought to know I have no interest in; $5.99 Gospel Hits? YAY, APPLE!
FFS.)
(And while I’m complaining about iTunes, why did anyone think that the “album rating” feature was a good idea as currently implemented?
It makes me incendiary with rage just thinking about how bad and wrong it is and how I can’t even fix its misratings.)
Bandcamp is really, really good for discovery, yeah.
(Pandora and Spotify aren’t awful, either, but Bandcamp hits above its weight.)