Zac Hall, 9to5Mac:
Apple Music has a strong foundation of handpicked playlists and curated music collections, and changes to the music service’s ‘For You’ section is dramatically improving Apple Music’s recommendation features.
Apple Music’s upgraded ‘For You section is now organized around music themes that are more personalized for each member, and updates to ‘For You’ are now much more frequent.
I’ve got a bit of a side-by-side going, with an iPhone running the public iOS 12.2 release, next to an iPad running the latest 12.3 beta. As I was noting the differences between old and new, my iPhone’s Music app blinked into the new interface, completely matching the For You on my iPad.
Point is, if you are not seeing the new For You, you will soon, no need to upgrade anything.
I do like the changes, and I do feel like the current recommendations are a much better representation of my musical tastes. Lots of interesting musical choices here.
I increasingly get the idea that Apple is trying to make me pay for Apple Music just to get useful suggestions.
Because the iTunes Store is worse than useless for it, they’re effectively removed “New from your Artists” [it appears randomly for everyone, it appears], and they keep pushing for a Music trial.
(I kid, but only a little.
Apple plainly doesn’t care about making ITMS a first-rate experience for browsing OR suggestions.
Because if they did, it would be a hundred times better than it is now.
I mean, do they think people with established profiles and purchase histories REALLY want to see generic new releases and endless pop music, if they don’t listen to or buy that?
I want to look at alternative, electronic, and metal by sub-genre, but that appears to be either literally impossible or so badly done and curated as to be worthless.
And their tagging barely even tries; at least on the store side there’s no reason a song can’t be tagged for five subgenres, for example, even if iTunes itself isn’t flexible enough to handle multiple genre tags…
Whenever Apple gets lucky with suggestions or what it fronts, I buy things; I’d spend significantly more money on ITMS if the experience wasn’t so uniformly awkward and bad.)