So it's been five days since I flipped the switch on Apple Music, and I need to talk about what it's done to my library, because it is not what I expected.
Quick recap for anyone who's been living under a rock: Apple Music showed up in the iOS 8.4 update last Tuesday, June 30th. Three months free, then $9.99 a month after that, or $14.99 if you want the family plan (up to six people, which is honestly a pretty good deal if you've got the family for it). There's also Beats 1, the 24-hour radio station with Zane Lowe, which I'll get to.
I want to like this. I really do. I've been paying for Spotify since 2013 and I'm not made of loyalty, I'll switch if something's actually better. But the first thing Apple Music did to me was reach into my iTunes library (the one I've been curating since roughly 2006, ripped CDs and all) and start quietly matching songs to its own catalog versions. Which sounds fine in theory. In practice I now have two copies of the National's Boxer, one of them retitled with weird bracketed tags, and an entire Neutral Milk Hotel album that got matched to a live bootleg instead of the studio version. Nobody asked me if I wanted that. iCloud Music Library just did it, in the background, while I was at work.
I've seen a few other people online complaining about the same thing this week, songs disappearing, metadata scrambled, whole albums showing up under the wrong artist. So it's not just me being precious about my mp3s (though I am also that).
The interface itself is a lot. There are five tabs now: For You, New, Radio, Connect, and My Music, and I genuinely could not tell you what Connect is for after using it for five days. It seems to be Apple's attempt at a social feed where artists post photos and clips directly to fans, sort of like if Tumblr and a press release had a baby. I clicked into it twice and both times bailed within thirty seconds. The "For You" tab, which is supposed to be the smart recommendation engine, keeps suggesting Coldplay to me. I have never once played Coldplay on this device. Not sure what signal it's picking up on there.
Beats 1 is the part I've actually enjoyed, weirdly. There's something nice about a single, curated, human-run station after years of algorithmic playlists, and Zane Lowe's got that breathless British DJ energy where everything is "the biggest record of the year," but it's a fun listen while I'm working, and it doesn't feel like it's trying to profile me the way the rest of the app does. If Apple Music was just Beats 1 and nothing else, I'd probably be fine with it.
Worth remembering too that this almost launched without paying artists during the free trial at all, until Taylor Swift wrote that open letter a couple weeks back and Apple reversed course within about a day. Say what you want about how that played out publicly, but it's a little wild that it took a letter from one of the biggest pop stars on earth to get that fixed a week before launch, rather than someone in Cupertino just thinking of it first.
Anyway. I'm going to stick out the three months since it's free and I'm curious whether the library mess settles down once the initial matching finishes churning through everything (it's apparently still "optimizing" as I write this, four days later, which feels like a long time for software to be optimizing anything). If you're on the fence about turning on iCloud Music Library specifically, and you've got a library you actually care about, I'd hold off a week or two and see if they patch some of this first. Turn on Apple Music the service, sure. Just maybe don't let it touch your files yet.
Small tangent since I'm already complaining: can we agree that redesigning an app's entire tab bar and expecting people to just figure it out is not the same thing as good design? I had to poke around for a solid two minutes just to find where my actual purchased music went. It's under "My Music," which, fine, but it wasn't the first place I looked.
More on this once the trial's further along. I've got a feeling I'll have opinions about the family plan too, once my brother inevitably asks to split it.