Apple’s 3 Month Music subscription will end soon and I’ve decided to cancel. Why? It’s kind of funny but like most technology use cases, I live on the fringe. What do I use Apple music for? I open iTunes, iOS Music or Apple CarPlay and click the “For You” Tab and hit play on a playlist. These curated Apple Music playlists based on songs you “love” (for which I do very often to improve the results) are well done. I’m going to miss these playlists because they’re so diverse and close to what I like but here’s the thing:
Every single song Apple Music has played for me is a song I already own as a part of the 21,000 songs I have in iTunes. I haven’t added music to iTunes from an artist I didn’t already have in 3 years. If a new album comes out from Kanye West, I’ll buy it but I have no idea what’s new in RAP or Indie or electronic as far as new artists go.
A playlist of Jay-Z in the 90s or Indie Campfire songs or Inspired by the Chemical Brothers are songs I have. Not a single song has been new to me. that’s good because I rarely discover new music that I actually want to buy but Apple music is really just acting like a genius recommendation service that’s already built into all of their music applications that I’ve been using for years. Genius Playlists are great and I use them a lot. “Songs like Ben Folds Brick” and make a playlist of 250 songs and listen to it all day.
So Apple Music hasn’t saved me any money. It’ll cost me money to keep using this service. In times that I want to find new music, iTunes Radio will work just fine and it’s still free with an AppleID (although it looks like I’m losing ad-free and unlimited skips by foregoing my Apple Music subscription).
In fact, Apple Music has cost me money. I used to have a 2 Gigabyte Verizon data plan that I shared between my iPad and iPhone. It was great. I disabled data for iTunes & Music on my devices and instead would sync with iTunes directly over USB. Now with Apple Music, if I want to utilize the “For You” curated playlists, I have to enable cellular and the result, 4-5 gigabytes of data per month is being spent on Apple Music. I tripled my data consumption which costs me an extra $30-$40 per month. I think the reason why is “make offline” I generally mark something offline before I go to bed, then grab my phone the next morning and go to work. The “make offline” task is still running for a playlist with 1500 songs and then all day my phone is eating many hundreds of megabytes of data.
Finally, if I try to save data and pre-download “Make this song offline” in Music for iOS, the songs take about 30-45 seconds per song to download over my 100 megabit Comcast connection with 2 WiFi Radios in my house with low signal noise. If I want to make 75 Cold play songs available offline, it takes about 3 hours to do that. Remember when we used to complain that Syncing to a first generation iPod took 10 seconds per song over FireWire? Welcome to 2001! :)
So Apple Music to me was a list of curated playlists with songs I already owned / were already on my iPhone but yet were being streamed from Apple and costing me $30 a month in data and in offline mode, would take many days to cache music for offline listening and would just drain my battery and cost me more data.
I don’t really know why I can’t get into streaming music. Maybe because I’m old fashioned and love the music I already have? Maybe I hate paying a recurring fee for Data + Streaming when I can just buy a CD and own the album forever and ever? I liked Spotify a lot because it actually helped me to discover new music. Their playlists were really good and, when I used Facebook, it would provide things my friends were listening to so I discovered new non-pop music that way but Spotify’s offline music was stuck at 2,000 songs so I couldn’t really carry the music with me. Plus, it didn’t work with my iPod Classic (Apple Music does’t either) so when I’m on a camping trip or in Europe or working out, the Apple Music playlists can’t even be stored on my iPod.
Okay, maybe I am old fashioned?
My sisters who are in their teens that have never bought a CD in their life probably love streaming music. They are never away from cell / wifi service and they can always listen to the latest new release pop music for a recurring $10 a month or share their subscription for $15 a month. Such an awesome deal.
I just don’t want to rely on data and a subscription model to listen to music I already own. I think it’s as simple as that. I do use iTunes Radio at work sometimes because I don’t have to think about what’s coming up next and the algorithm is way better than Pandora. iTunes Radio will still work without Apple Music but it appears I’ll have advertisements which is a bummer. I hate ads. Luckily, my Apple keyboard has a mute button. Problem solved.
If I can get better new music recommendations from Apple and offline downloads that actually work along with streaming that works on my very weak cell service up here in New Hampshire? I might join again. I like the interface a lot of Apple Music. I just think I’m not the use case for any streaming service. Hell, I download YouTube videos to my computer so I can watch them offline without using data or dealing with buffering issues or ads or Adobe Flash. I don’t know of anyone that downloads YT videos. I still don’t like YT because full screen is littered with annotations, ads, overlays, ‘cards’ and all of these distractions that detract from the video. I also like watching everything on my television instead of a tiny laptop screen.
The 21st century is not going to treat me well.
I’m also a little bummed that I sold my iPhone yesterday in anticipation for getting an iPhone 6S next week and my Apple Watch is not usable even as a time-piece because no iPhone is linked to it.
I’m sorry this is a bit of a rant. Everything from Apple is great. I just think all technology is just getting away from me. Everything requires daily charging and a constant data connection or constantly to be connected to another device. It’s like my digital life is just one big multi-function printer.
Can’t wait to go camping again. Nature is great and doesn’t need a subscription to be enjoyed.