It’s finally here. Apple’s long-awaited step into the music-streaming world has launched. Apple Music is now available on your iPhone, Mac and PC – with a three month free trial.
Pricing
The new Apple Music lives inside your updated Music App. At initial setup, you’ll be asked to select the membership plan you want to sign up to when the three month free trial ends, which you’ll be automatically be charged for after the trial. Your options are a single subscription for AED 19.99 a month, or family plan including six family members for AED 29.99 a month.
Apple has different pricing structures around the world. While the U.S. gets the single subscription for $10/month, the UAE’s pricing is set at AED 19.99, and in India at around $2. Of course it’s worth pointing out that music catalogue (labels licensing) availability will vary from country to country, which is a factor for prices in addition to the country dynamics and competing services.
Getting Started
Next, a bunch of genres pop up in circles which you can pick from to tell Apple Music what you like to listen to, as well as stuff you don’t like. Tapping the bubbles once indicates you “like” the genre; double tap and you’ll be “loving” it. Pressing and holding down on a genre indicates that you hate the mentioned genre, and the bubble will pop and disappear.
The genres selection is pretty generic and range from Jazz, Pop, Dance, Country to Alternative. At the moment, the selection is rather limited in my opinion and could be expanded upon. Once done with select your genres, you’ll be presented with another bubble list of artists you may like.
After this step, Apple Music will be able to draw up a list of recommended playlists and albums under the “For You” tab.
Navigation
The UI is pretty, clean and pleasing to look at, but might also get crowded sometimes. Its light and translucent colour themes make navigating a pleasant experience to use. Once you’re past the setting up stage, you can then start flicking between the five available tabs at the bottom. These include “For You”, “New”, “Radio”, Apple’s new music social network “Connect”, and “My Music”.
For You
Once you’ve selected your favourite genres and artists in the previous step, the “For You” tab will populate with music that Apple believes you will like based on your selections. The more music you listen to and the more tracks you ‘like’, the better the recommendations become. For instance, when I started listening to some of my 80s and 90s music, the app curated songs from artists in that era and recommended an “Old School Braai” playlist for me, which included hits from Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Queen and Phil Collins.
New
“New” does what it says: it displays the newest music released. Selections range from hot tracks, to new music, top songs, music spotlight to activity-based playlists picked by Apple’s music editors and curators. Once you discover the music you want listen to, you’ll be able to add them to your own playlist, download for offline listening and other actions shown in the screenshot below.
Radio
Let’s start with the obvious: the Middle East didn’t get the Beats 1 love, so we couldn’t really review it. The available options in this tab go back to the standard radio options offered like “Charting Now”, “The Mix Tape” and others. The tracks in Radio are of course skippable.
Connect
It’s still early to know if this feature will prove to be useful. Connect is an artist-focused social-network that shows updates from your favourite artists, and gives musicians access to share things like song lyrics, behind-the-scenes clips and upcoming events and announcements. For me, the first thing I got on this tab was Pearl Jam, which is of course based on the artists I told Apple I love.
My Music
My Music is where you’ll find all of your music, be it your iTunes purchases, Apple Music stuff and your own music uploaded to the cloud. Adding music to the library is extremely easy and, as mentioned above, you can simply search for a song, hit the ‘+’ button to add it to My Music, or add it to a specific playlist and download for offline listening.
This is where I have personally hit some rough patches. Initially, none of my playlists on my Mac synced with iOS and vice versa, and whatever I added didn’t sync either. Another problem I faced was downloading my songs from the cloud for offline listening; Apple’s servers were stuck in a loop attempting to download all my songs, costing me around 5GB of data in 2 hours without my awareness. To cut it short, after a long conversation with Apple Support (awesome people by the way), we were able to rectify the glitch and all went back to normal.
The Verdict
After playing around with and testing Apple Music, I can say that I’m impressed. So far, so good, the interface is the best of any streaming service I used, and the integration across the Apple ecosystem makes it feel that you own every song on the library. Apple Music feels like a one stop music shop. Although the launch came with some glitches here and there, I’m sure things will normalise in the next few weeks.
What’s Next?
With Apple Music officially launched, things are about to heat up for Anghami, the first legal streaming service in the Middle East. Next week, we take a look at what’s next for Anghami and how they plan to stand against Apple music.
