So Beats Music actually launched today. Not "soon," not "this quarter," today, January 21st, and I had the app downloaded on my phone by about 9:30 this morning because I'd been curious about this thing since the Dre/Iovine/Trent Reznor lineup got announced last year. Yes, that Trent Reznor. He's the "Chief Creative Officer" over there now, which is still a weird sentence to type.
Ten bucks a month for the standalone plan. If you're on AT&T you can apparently get it for $7.99 through some bundled deal, which I didn't bother chasing down because I'm not an AT&T customer and wasn't about to switch carriers over a music app.
The thing everyone's going to write about is the onboarding. Instead of just dumping you into a search bar like Spotify does, Beats Music makes you go through this whole "this or that" ritual — pick an artist you like out of two options, again, again, about a dozen times — and then it drops you into what they're calling "The Sentence." You fill in blanks: I'm [feeling] with [someone] and I want to hear [genre]. Fill it out and it spits out a playlist. I typed in something like "I'm tired with my roommate and I want to hear something mellow" mostly to see what it'd do, and it actually gave me a pretty decent playlist, some Bon Iver, some older Feist. Not mad about it.
Here's my actual gripe though. I already pay for Spotify. Have for about a year and a half now, ever since I got fed up ripping CDs I don't even own anymore (side note: I still have about 40GB of MP3s from 2007 sitting on an external drive that I have not opened in at least two years and probably never will again, but I refuse to delete it, don't ask me why). So the question isn't "is Beats Music good," it's "is Beats Music good enough to make me pay for two streaming services at once," and right now the answer is no. The curation angle is nice, actual humans picking playlists instead of an algorithm guessing based on what I skipped, but Spotify's Discover stuff has gotten decent enough that I don't feel starved for human touch.
Also, no web player. At all. If you want Beats Music you're on iOS, Android, or apparently Windows Phone, but there's nothing you can just pull up in a browser tab at your desk, which is honestly where I do most of my listening during the day. That feels like a strange thing to skip on launch day in 2014, but maybe they're saving it for later.
One thing I will give them credit for: the app itself doesn't feel like a version 1. It's fast, the transitions between screens are smooth, nothing crashed on me in about forty minutes of poking around, which is more than I can say for some app launches I've suffered through on this blog over the years (looking at you, that one weather app from 2012 that ate my battery in about ninety minutes flat).
I don't think Beats Music is going to unseat Spotify or Rdio for people who are already locked in somewhere, and honestly the market's getting crowded, how many ten-dollar-a-month buckets of the same twenty million songs does one person need. But if you're someone who's never paid for streaming and you like the idea of a human curator over an algorithm, it's a reasonable place to start, and the free trial (a week, I think, maybe longer if you catch a promo) costs you nothing to try.
I'll probably keep it installed through the trial period just to mess with the playlist stuff some more, mostly out of curiosity about how it handles weirder combinations in The Sentence thing. If it recommends me something genuinely great I don't already know I might report back. If not, it's getting deleted the second that trial clock runs out, because I am not paying twenty dollars a month combined just to listen to music I could get for ten.