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Apple Music Was Always Going To Win (gizmodo.com)
Apple Music is about to overtake Spotify as the most popular streaming music service in the United States, the Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend. Gizmodo: [...] Here's where the inevitability comes into play. Because all Apple devices come preloaded with Apple Music, countless consumers start using Apple Music without knowing any better. It's effectively become the streaming music analogue of Microsoft pushing people to surf the web with Internet Explorer. The big difference is that people eventually have to pay for Apple Music, which is the same price as Spotify. As many suspected when it launched three years ago, Apple Music was bound to succeed simply because Apple is big enough and rich enough to will it so. Think about it this way: Spotify gained traction quickly after its 2011 launch, largely because music enthusiasts had seen its streaming model succeed globally and wanted to try this neat new thing. After all, there wasn't anything quite like it at the time, and Americans love to feel innovative.
But eventually, Spotify would cease to feel special and new. As the years passed, practically every major tech company launched its own music streaming service. And then, in 2015, Apple unveiled Apple Music in 2015 -- which was really just a rebranded version of Beats Music. Because Apple could preload the service on iPhones, Watches, and Macs, the company could effectively tap into a new revenue stream without actually inventing anything.
But eventually, Spotify would cease to feel special and new. As the years passed, practically every major tech company launched its own music streaming service. And then, in 2015, Apple unveiled Apple Music in 2015 -- which was really just a rebranded version of Beats Music. Because Apple could preload the service on iPhones, Watches, and Macs, the company could effectively tap into a new revenue stream without actually inventing anything.
I thought the iPhone only had about a 1/3 market share in the US. Hardly Microsoftâ(TM)s 95+% they had in the heyday of Windows and the browser wars. Come to think of it, how how does Apple Music become the biggest service when itâ(TM)s only available on a minority of devices?
When used on MacOS, iTunes is pretty good, On windows it might be another story.
I used Pandora and Spotify until I got my iPhone 6, which was my first that had Siri. Being able to use voice control for my music in the car made Apple Music the obvious choice.
Since the catalog is pretty much the same for on-demand specific music between the major services, the one that is integrated into my phone just makes sense. If Amazon or Spotify stood out in some other way, I would consider them, but they don't.
The last I heard, more than 90% of computers don't run MacOS and more than 80% of the smartphones being used in the world are not iPhones. That means that less than 10% of desktop and laptop computers, and less than 20% of smartphones, being used today, have Apple Music pre-installed. Based on that alone, it doesn't appear to be a given that Apple Music would win. So, it must have to do with which users are using iPhones and Macs. Also, keep in mind that before streaming services started being offered, iTunes was the biggest music retailer, and iTunes did allow you to stream the content you bought (IIRC, it was called iTunes Match). So Apple just had to get their existing iTunes customers to start paying for Apple Music. I suspect that that, as well as Apple's long-standing entrenchment in the music industry, was what determined whether Apple Music would win or not.
Well, it kinda does, it's just Play Music is always pushing so much other crap that you probably don't notice.
I'm in the boat I rarely use Play Music. It's a terrible app. Just launched it after not using it for a while and the first thing I see is a popup "Music for where you are". I can't do anything with the app until I respond to the popup, which reads "At the gym? In the car? On your couch? Get music based on your location". I DON'T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK THAT'S EVEN SUPPOSED TO MEAN. Why why why why would I be interested in different music if I'm sitting down vs, I don't know, not sitting down?
Let me hit Skip. OK, now it's a bunch of recommendations. My music library is nowhere to be seen. I guess I'm going to have to hit the hamburger menu. Music Library is at the top... hahah, just kidding, no it's the fifth item in the menu, just below "New Releases". Wait? What? New Releases? And above that is "Top Charts"? So Google wants me to look at someone else's music library before I get access to my own.
But let's go to Music Library, and OK, Google at least defaulted to Albums, because that's the last thing I used presumably. But have you seen the albums view? Google has managed to fuck this one up too, at any one time I can see six albums on screen. The screen is dominated by album covers. These covers consist of a gray box with a darker gray circle containing a music note in them for 90% of my library, because it doesn't recognize the CD I ripped.
Underneath each is the label JUST KIDDING, no it's about 14 characters from the start of the label. Why 14? Because that's all that will fit on one line if you split the screen into two columns of boxes. If they, you know, showed a list, like the iPod used to do, I'd probably see the whole label in the majority of cases. But now I see things like "The 9 symphoni..." and "Adventures beyo..."
Well, what I want to listen to is Beethoven's symphony #6. The version in my library. I can't use the album view because it sucks, so let me use the search. I try "Beethoven symphony 6" and I get.... directed to... some Beethoven "radio station"? And nothing in my library. I mean, why the fuck would I want that? I literally have no way of finding the right album without scrolling through boxes of circles with music notes in them squinting at text that might include part of the word "Symphony" in it but rarely even includes the composer's name.
This is an awful app. I rarely listen to my music library these days, because the only way to access it is via this thing that sucks, so I've been building playlists using Amazon Prime's free music (and the music I've bought via Amazon) instead, but their app is only marginally better.
But that said, Amazon, for all their faults, does not stop me looking at my music when I start their app, bringing up a dialog box to demand I look at some shitty new feature.
One day I will meet Sergey Brin. I will hand him my phone. I will tell him there is a version of Beethoven's 6th in my library, and give him 30 seconds to find it. When he fails, I'll ask him why.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.