Apple Music has a fundamental problem that goes deeper than mere bugs and UI confusion - here’s the problem and how to fix it. Dave B Follow Feb 13, 2016 · 16 min read

Last year, I posted a popular thread on Reddit about the shortcomings in the iOS 7/8 Music app and what I felt needed to be done to address them. It got a lot of positive feedback regarding that analysis of the app’s faults, so now that the new app and Apple Music service have been out for a while and have been HIGHLY controversial, Apple’s status in the music space needs an update.

First let’s start with the good:

I can thankfully say that many of the smaller issues listed in that thread have been addressed, the UI has been improved in some noticeable ways, and many of the bugs and glitches have been ironed out. The aesthetics are improved (ie. the algorithmic UI colours), the search function is orders of magnitude better than it was, the slide-up mini-player is a great new UI addition, and there are a lot of other UI elements that have been cleaned up and improved from the old app.

Many people harshly criticize the new Apple Music UI, and I agree that there are some SIGNIFICANT problems (which I will thoroughly discuss below), but it’s honestly leagues better than the old iOS Music app was. Yes, it’s complex, but there’s a sense of logic to the menu trees, so that you can usually get a feel for your place within the app. There’s a bit of a learning curve, but once you figure it out, it makes sense. There’s a lot stuffed in there, which can be overwhelming at times, but it’s laid out in an organized manner, in my opinion. In other words, the app is complicated but I’d also argue that it’s logically cohesive, for the most part. And while it was very buggy to start with last year, many of the bugs have been fixed and the bug fixes will keep on coming, so I’m not too concerned about that.

With that out of the way, let’s get to the purpose of this article

The problem:

Apple Music has a MAJOR problem that, in my opinion, is far deeper and more troublesome than the bugs and UI issues that many people criticize. The app is lacking an important feature set, which is reflective of an underlying flaw in the direction of the app’s design. It’s this design flaw which I believe is the main culprit behind the widespread disdain for and criticism toward the app. In short: Apple Music lacks curation and organization within your own music library.

Our music listening habits have changed. We no longer live in a world of individual albums and mix CDs. We live in an age of massive music collections comprising thousands — often tens of thousands — of songs. This is especially true with the emergence of streaming music services, where you can listen to 30 million tracks anytime you want and add virtually anything to your collection in mere seconds. So with these growing libraries, the question is, how do we keep them manageable? How do we sort through all the cruft and find what to listen to?

One suggestion is curation. When it comes to finding new music, Apple Music is great. The Beats team’s curated playlists are impressive. There’s a great playlist for every mood, every occasion, and every theme. When you want to find something new to listen to, Apple Music has you covered.

But what about when you want to listen to music that you already know and love? We all have many songs in our library that we love, and most of the time, those are what we want to listen to. That’s where Apple Music seriously falls short. There’s no great way to organize and play your own music library. We all have increasingly large and unwieldy music libraries, and there’s no way to properly sort through what you want to listen to. There’s no way to organize and find the music you want to hear when you want to hear it.

Right now, there are 3 primary ways to select your music:

select something by a fixed category (artist/album/genre/etc…) and go through the menu tree use the search function to find something specific that you have in mind select a playlist that you’ve previously created

There’s no intelligent way to sort through your music library and pick out the music that you currently feel like listening to.

What if you’re in the mood to listen to a particular subset of your music? For example, I’m often in the mood to listen to a particular band. How do I do that? I can select an album or play the entire discography, but there will be a lot of tracks in there that I don’t like. Even my favorite bands have plenty of songs that don’t appeal to me. So why can’t I just play all the metal songs that I have rated 3 stars and above? Why can’t I just play all my favourite indie music or just my recently added prog rock or all my classic rock favorites that I haven’t heard in a while? Or what if I want to play all the great stuff that I’ve recently discovered and ‘hearted’ via Apple Music? What if I want to create a playlist of just the Iron Maiden songs that I like or just the Animal Collective songs that I’ve been enjoying lately or just the Beethoven pieces that I find exciting?

You can’t do any of that. You can use iTunes to create Smart Playlists based on these characteristics but I don’t want to have to create and manage a new playlist every time I feel like listening to something. Apple Music needs a better way to sort through what you already know and love. It needs a better way to organize the music that you’re already familiar with. In a world of giant music collections and long, unwieldy artist/album/song lists, there needs to be a better way to find, assemble, and play what you want to hear.

That’s the problem. We no longer live in a world of individual albums and small playlists. Our music collections consist of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of tracks, and so that makes it extremely difficult to sort through them and pick out what you want to hear. You can use the search function but that’s too specific and you need to know exactly what you want to listen to in advance. You can scroll through the artist/genre/album list, but that’s too time-consuming and difficult due to the sheer size of your library. You can play Beats playlists, but those consist of someone else’s music. I want to be able to listen to my music. I want to be able to do so in a simple, intuitive way. Apple Music doesn’t allow for that. It focuses so heavily on curated playlists (aka. someone else’s music suggestions), that it doesn’t provide a good way to sift through YOUR MUSIC.

Notice that 4 of the 5 main tabs in the app are about providing you with recommendations. 80% of the app is about someone else’s music. ‘For You’, ‘New’, ‘Radio’, and ‘Connect’ are all about discovery. Only 1 of the 5 (‘My Music’) is about playing music the user knows and loves. That balance is inherently flawed because when a music lover is listening to music, he or she wants to listen to music she loves, with some discovery thrown in (rather than vice versa).

In other words, most of the time, I want to listen to music I know and love, and a portion of the time, I want to discover new things to add to that. Apple Music has things the other way around. It puts the vast majority of its focus on discovery, and only a small portion on listening to your own music.

That’s why Apple Music is so frustrating.

That’s why Apple Music is so frustrating. That’s why so many of us are annoyed by it. It’s not simply the aesthetic way the UI is set up; it’s the fact that underneath it all, Apple Music is built almost entirely around the idea of providing you with someone else’s recommendations, and sorting through your own library — the most important part of the music listening experience — is treated as an afterthought. That makes it hard to find what you’re looking for. That makes it hard to choose what you feel like listening to.

What can be done to solve this?

There are ways to fix this. Here’s what I propose:

1. What Apple Music needs is a filtering system. It needs tags and filters. It needs a way where you can specify the characteristics of what you want to listen to, and then have a playlist dynamically and immediately created from your own library in real time. Like I said in that previous thread (points # 3 and #4), there should be a simple, dynamic sorting method. Instead of having to go through the classical nested folder music selection method (i.e. Artist → Album → Song), there should be a simple, intuitive way to select the characteristics of what you want to listen to, and then as you add characteristics, your entire library gets filtered in real time. iTunes used to have a feature similar to this a few years ago but for some inexplicable reason, it was taken out. iOS needs a modern take on that. Think of how the ‘Nearby Location’ filters work in iOS 9’s Apple Maps update (where the little tag gets placed in the search field), but allow for multiple tags to drill down further into what you want to hear. Obviously you don’t want too much complexity, but the point is that this whole system where you can only sort your music by going into a static menu tree (i.e. Artist → Album → Song or Genre → Album → Song) — needs to go away and something more fluid and dynamic needs to replace it.

2. Star ratings need to play a big role in this filter system. Ratings are fundamental. They are how the listener chooses what he loves and what he doesn’t. People want to listen to songs that they’ve given high ratings to, so star ratings are the perfect way to make the above sorting idea work. As I mentioned above, something as simple as playing all the 3+ star songs of a particular band — is absolutely essential. Then I could select a star rating and only songs from that genre with that star rating remain. Or I could do this with artists. Or dates added. And so on. The premise is the same as Smart Playlists in iTunes, but it needs to occur in real time, on your iDevice, and with a great Apple UI.

3. These ratings need to be more easily visible. I like how iOS 9.3 moved the star ratings from appearing when you tap the song title, to now appearing when you tap the album art. It’s more intuitive that way. But it’s still not enough. I want to be able to see a song’s rating BEFORE I play it, as that helps me decide what to listen to next. I think the rating should be visible on every single line, next to where the ellipsis menus and song durations are. Since placing 5 stars on every line would take up too much UI space and create clutter, perhaps Apple can place a single star outline with a number in it, indicating the star rating. When you hold your finger over this icon, the 5 stars would slide out and you could slide your finger over to whatever rating you feel is appropriate for that song. Then you would release your finger, and that would set the ratings and restore the icon back to a star outline with that rating number inside of it. The idea is that star ratings need to be easily visible because when you, the music listener, are trying to decide what you want to hear next, seeing songs that you’ve rated 3, 4, or 5 stars functions as a nice reminder that you like those songs, and so you can choose to play them next.

4. Stars and hearts need to be combined into one rating system. I understand that they serve two different functions (ie. hearts affect the algorithms of the ‘For You’ section), but having two separate ratings systems adds needless complexity, and the hearts’ binary on/off system is too limiting. That’s why I think it would be great to roll the two systems together, and perhaps any song with 4 or 5 stars can be treated in the same way that hearted songs are currently treated (i.e. they would affect the ‘For You’ section). And if you believe that hearts are preferable symbols to stars, simply do everything mentioned above, but with hearts (i.e. a 0–5 heart system, heart outlines with a rating inside etc…) The idea is that an on/off heart is too limiting when you want to rate your music. 0–5 hearts/starts is much better. And there should only be one rating system.

The purpose

The point of all of this is that adding a clear, concise, prominent, and ubiquitous ratings system would solve one of the biggest problems people have with Apple Music — being able to find what you like in an unwieldy music library within a complex app.

I’ve been thinking about this for many months and I truly believe that one of the biggest reasons why people don’t like the Apple Music UI is because it makes it difficult to get to what you want to hear. You, the user, want to listen to what you like or what you’re in the mood to hear. The Apple Music UI isn’t set up in a manner to do that, because it focuses far too heavily on giving you new music suggestions and doesn’t provide a way to allow you to listen to what you know and love. Filters and prominent star ratings would solve that problem.

Star ratings allow you to essentially tag what you like, and placing these star ratings front and center in the UI would allow you to easily see and return to these items that you’ve tagged. Star ratings exist to give you an idea of what to play next. When you love a song, you give it a high rating so that you can be reminded to play it in the future. By keeping these ratings so hidden, you can’t do that. That’s why they need to take center stage. Combine those with filters to sift through your massive music library, and the entire Apple Music experience will be leagues better.

That’s the biggest problem I see facing Apple Music and how Apple can address it.

Apple Music receives a lot of flak for its bugs and its UI, but it has an even bigger issue that needs to be addressed.

Section 2:

On top of that main issue, there are a number of other major aspects of Apple Music that need to be addressed

A few thoughts and analyses of Apple Music’s UI:

1. The mini-player is the best thing to ever happen to the Music app’s UI. Having quick, easy access to whatever you’re listening to — from any screen — was a great move on Apple’s part. There is so much stuff crammed into that app that even though it’s well-organized, it’s overwhelming just by virtue of that fact that there are so many tabs and panes and search bars everywhere. The mini-player adds a constant to the app. It lets you get your bearings and always access what it is you’re playing.

2. The ellipsis menu is the worst thing to ever happen to the Music app’s UI. Honestly, why would Apple do this? Having one tiny button with so much key functionality crammed in there is a UI nightmare. Apple has been so staunchly opposed to implementing a hamburger menu into its software, but this is almost the same thing! Throwing a whole grab bag of important features into one place like that is just bad UI design. When Apple first unveiled this ellipsis menu in iOS 8.4, I thought it was just a stopgap solution for the inevitable 3D Touch functionality. Press on any song, album, or artist, and you’d get a nice selection of actions to undertake. That would make sense. Instead, we have these tiny ellipsis symbols thrown into the corner, where it’s a pain to access.

3. The “New” tab should be changed to “Explore”. This is self-explanatory. “New” is not a good descriptor for what that tab is.

4. The primary focus of the app is off. This goes back to the main thesis of this article, as I really want to stress that point. If you look at the app’s design, there are 5 main tabs that are constantly on the screen. 4 out of the 5 are about discovering new music. Literally 80% of the UI is about playing things that you may not know. Who does that really appeal to? I love discovering new music constantly, but do I really want 80% of the app’s focus to be around discovery and recommendations? Of course not. There needs to be a greater focus on playing YOUR OWN MUSIC. There needs to be a better way to sort through, organize, and curate the songs, albums, artists, and genres that you’re already familiar with. That goes back to the filters/ratings that I discussed in detail above.

5. The “For You” section needs to be better organized. I’m not certain what the best alternative would be, but this Twitter-like feed of album art — just isn’t conducive to discovery. I like the concept but not the implementation. There’s far too much scrolling and it’s easy to lose track of things.

6. Artist discographies need to be better sorted. When I’m looking at an artist’s page, I don’t want every LP, EP, b-sides, live album and so on thrown together in one list. There needs to be a prominent section that focuses specifically on the artist’s main discography. Wikipedia does this well. Apple Music should, too.

7. The “More By” and “You May Also Like” suggestions need to be removed from the album page. There are other places within the app for that. When I’m looking at an album, I want it to feel like I’m peering into my music collection. Throwing album/artist suggestions at the bottom makes it feel like I’m looking at advertisements. I don’t want that. It breaks the feeling of enjoying your own music collection.

8. I like the “Recently Added” section, but it should scroll left and right like it does on the Apple Watch. Three items is too few and it’s a pain to have to hit that tiny “Recently Added” button to see more.

9. Continuity. We need this. Being able to transition seamlessly from the desktop to mobile would be really nice. If I’m listening to music on my computer, it would be great to be able to grab my iPhone, leave my apartment, and pick up right where I left off. Right now, iTunes and Apple Music are two different worlds.

10. The app needs a list of pre-ordered or “awaiting” albums. Often I hear about music I want to download that’s not coming out for a few months, but then I forget about it after a few weeks of waiting. There should be a simple list that assembles it all, just like the Wish List in the App Store app. And it should send a Notification once the album is released.