by Christopher Sherrod

I had been waiting for Apple Music to drop and as I was on the road in San Francisco without wifi when it came out. I woke up and make a rash dash to the nearest wifi cafe to download the update to my iPhone 5 as Apple won't allow me to do it over cellular connection. I was so excited as I sat around the de Young Cafe inside Golden Gate Park while the update downloaded, and the even slower installing and rebooting of my phone while I walked around appreciating the artwork.

After the slowest update I've ever encountered on an iPhone I immediately went into Apple Music.

First impressions were fantastic. Great user interface. Loved the whole feel of the app. It looks gorgeous.

Funny thing is the day before Spotify tried to charge me $9.99 and it failed, card number changed. By the time I got to my laptop on Monday to fix the card number I instead canceled my premium account. I was already positive I wouldn't use Spotify again.

Curated Content

For You Recommendations are solid across several genres too

The curated content really did it for me. I listened to several Jazz albums using the queue functionality which is perfect. Then I listened to the recommended albums under Dance and Electronic (my favorite genres).

That was it, I was done. I deleted the Spotify app from my iPhone.

I spent a couple of hours looking up my favorite artists and following them in Apple Music. Plus I hearted a ton of songs. I wanted the For You section to offer up cool new music I would love. In music I’m really great with Apple knowing exactly my personal tastes for products on Amazon not so much, but with music please predict what I want to listen to next.

After a day Apple Music was predicting tons of playlists and albums that I would love to listen to. Really accurately too. Great prediction engine. I'm a fan.

Requested Updates

Now there are a couple of things I miss but they are not deal killers for me.

1. The music fan to music fan peer social networking missing is a bummer. I liked seeing what my friends on Spotify were listening to.

2. Correction, there is an Equalizer. No Equalizer, however the app sounds better than Spotify so I’m not really missing it, well a little I like tweaking EQ.

3. Correction, click on … then name of album to goto album page where you can goto artist page from. The ability when listening to a song have a shortcut to go to that artist's page or album page. I loved this music discovery trick on Spotify and miss it.

4. Missing New Age genre category. Come on this category has existed for decades and is one of my favorites.

Radio Reborn

And Beat 1 Radio station showed me that I kinda of missed listening to radio DJs. I'll listen to it on occasion, maybe even as background when working.

Apple did it again when a very solid hit release.