Apple Music, on the other hand, has a pretty strong bent towards curation and suggestion. It's clearly oriented to encourage you to use the curated playlists that Apple Music's folks are creating, and other suggestions based on your tastes. It's also pretty good IMO at providing suggestions based on the music you're currently looking at so you can keep investigating.

I get the feeling the playlist functionality in iTunes 12.2 and the latest iOS is mostly the exact same as it was in previous versions—I don't think it's been integrated into Apple Music at all (yet?). Right now it's just a way of organizing things that are part of your music, rather than a way of organizing things that are part of Apple Music.

So, while it's perfectly fair to be frustrated with the playlist creation experience, I think it's also worth appreciating the fact that Apple stayed true to what they've been saying and marketing around Apple Music. Those user experiences are, at least for me, very straightforward and have generally been quite good. So maybe generalizing and saying “Apple Music is a Usability Nightmare” is overstating a tad… Even though saying “Apple Music's Playlist Story is a Usability Nightmare” maybe isn't.

Say what you will about Spotify, but their native iOS app is really top-notch. I keep finding little details that make my user experience so much more delightful. For example, I recently learned that you could swipe left and right on the "now playing" bar on the bottom to move between songs. It feels really organic and I wish other players would adopt it. I also just found out that you can swipe right on songs to queue them up for playback, and now I use it all the time. Dunno WTF happened with their desktop client, though.

Oh, and now that I've learned that you can (secretly) search Spotify by genre ('genre:"progressive metal"') and see the top tracks, my life (and music discovery) have been much improved. I also routinely bulk-add the top tracks from artists I'm investigating to get a feel for their music. Don't see a way to do either in Apple Music.

To say Apple Music is a "usability nightmare" is a HUGE stretch IMO. If I opened the app and was presented with 1000 different options along with every single interface guideline being ignored, sure, maybe that would be a "nightmare".

I think what you mean to say is "Apple Music isn't close enough to perfect yet, from a usability standpoint."

But overall why do we need a playlist to add songs to a library. I have so many gigs of music on my desktop. When I pay for a music subscription I want to replicate that.

Trying to do that in spotify is a disaster. Not only does the interface both web and fat client become slow and cluttered but you don't get a hierarchical view.

I went back to just following artists on spotify. Then when I want to listen to an album I just go through the semi hierarchy. I tend to listen to full albums not songs.

The fact that you can't save an entire artist on spotify says everything.

I really like Google Play music but google doesn't give it the care spotify does. Google takes the stance that their algorithms can solve every problem and spotify knows humans need to be there to fix some issues. One common issue I saw on Google Play Music was albums belonging to artists of the same or very similar names being listed on each other pages. The worst part is google gives users no way to alert them.

I truly hope apple shakes things up.

The only small consolation is that I don't use playlists, so it doesn't really affect me. But, ooof—it's quite the bad UI.

The trick is to follow people you don't know on Rdio, find a weird album you like, see who listened to it and if they have good taste in music follow them. Then see who they're following, etc etc. Forget about playlists just focus on albums. Try not to follow people you know personally and be ruthless in unfollowing people because it only takes one Drake fan to pollute your Trending page.

But yes Apple Music is horrible. It's the first time I've gotten the sense that Apple really doesn't know what they're doing and that's a scary thought.

The entire industry is aware of the fact that user-generated playlists don't actually work to achieve mega-scale consumption. If they did, Spotify would be at 200m global subscribers and we would all pay for enhanced playlist features. People don't actually know what they want to listen to, and they don't want to spend time on curation -- not even on time curating their curators.

Spotify was built on the false premise that people wanted a "social jukebox" and that this "social stickiness" would somehow create an experience that, when combined with licenses to every track possible, would create an experience superior to pirated channels. Look, they'd say -- you can now see what your friends are listening to, and enjoy unparalleled social discovery! Better still, you can simply subscribe to their playlists and ride off their cool vibes!

The vast majority of people just don't care about this stuff, and definitely not enough to pay for it. They want to press play and skip stuff. And that's about it. The Pandora UI is the UI to beat. Everyone in the business knows this -- hence why you see everyone pushing radio metaphors over playlists.

If you're judging Apple Music on the basis of its playlist UI, you're an edge-case user judging edge-case features. Time to reflect on the fact that you aren't the target audience.

music for ios is another story...

Hopefully this 1.0 and they'll improve.

> I turned on the Beats1 station to see if it was any good, heard some rap "music", and then very very quickly turned that station off.

It's OK not to personally like specific genres, but please don't go as far as to dismiss those you don't like as not being "music".

That icon was removed several years ago. You can enable it but its not there by default. Most macs dont have optical drives anymore.

My mac and my ipad are constantly griping that they cannot reach the itunes store. thats because i often have no internet connection. im more productive that way, see.

Enriching the corporation is not what music is for. I can earn some goodmoney as a coder but to be honest I find playing piano for tips to be a far mor satisfying experience.

(also beats1 is great)

With zero observation of what people want and how they experience it, he conducts a dry and pedantic assassination of the UI.

I've talked to 4 regular users today all of whom were having an enjoyable experience and expressing no concern about the UI - instead the conversation was all about what it was allowing people to discover and listen to.

The only person who had any discomfort with the service was a friend who hasn't used streaming before and was concerned about the ephemeral nature of what he listened to - I.e. Unlike with buying musing it's easy to listen to a lot of stuff and not make a connection with it to a particular place and time.

In any case unless you like pedantry, don't read this article - instead listen to some music.