Thoughts on Apple Music
It feels as if Apple designed their new streaming service just for people like me. But I've not been tempted to try it and, for the foreseeable future, I have no intention of doing so
A bit of background: I've been using Apple computers since 2001. A giant Macintosh Performa 5200 sat on my desk, valiantly attempting to run OS9. I didn't task it to do anything as complex as play music because that would confuse it, but my trusty Dell laptop from the same era gladly ran iTunes and, thrilled with the ability to have all my music in one place, I ploughed through my CD collection and digitised everything I had. My first iPod in 2004 was a revelation; the launch of iTunes Match in 2011 - a service that scanned my music library and made it available on any (Apple) device connected to the internet - was a master stroke.
I'm deep in the Apple ecosystem and can't see myself migrating away. Yet. Everything works together so nicely that I've no reason to.
(Presumed) service quality
It's a cliché, but Apple's cloud services have historically been somewhere on the scale of disappointing-to-terrible. iTunes Match has always worked really well, but MobileMe - the precursor to iCloud - used to experience frequent outages, downtime, or sudden bouts of features simply failing to work.
iCloud's almost at a point where it's reliable, but even after four years of availability it's still maddeningly prone to not being as seamless as it should. My photo library appears to live in the cloud, but photos taken on my phone don't seem to sync for days, if at all. Sometimes high resolution versions of historic photos in that library refuse to download at all. There are probably thousands of happy users of the iCloud email client, but I dare not even attempt to start any meaningful conversation through that platform.
Apple Music promises that your music files and those from its own service will mesh together invisibly. A major selling point of the service is that you can add any music file in the iTunes store and add it to your library, creating a hybrid between music that you've purchased and music that you're 'borrowing' from the service as a subscriber.
This meshing of what's yours and what's not brings me out in a cold sweat. My iTunes library is well over a decade old, and though it doesn't contain a copy of every single odd LP I own it's pretty comprehensive. It is, in some odd way, a reflection of me. A service that ostensibly makes little-to-no delineation between what's mine in the long term and in the short is totally unappealing.
But that's almost inconsequential when there's the possibility that by scanning my library and merging it with a commonly-owned library in the cloud, my original library will be corrupted. There are a myriad reports of this happening - Jim Dalrymple's very public critique is the most notable, but it seems that everyone I speak to who's tried the service has had some problem or other. Sometimes the problem is minor - a song on an album suddenly having the wrong artwork, for example - but occasionally it's substantial, like an entire library being corrupted, re-labelled, or simple overwritten.
Even though I back my entire computer up every week, that's a very scary prospect.
The value of music
At greater issue is what Apple Music represents.
A confession: I've routinely shunned music streaming services. It's not that they're incomplete or too expensive or that the sound quality is too low, it's that they make music seem, well, cheap. Disposable.
I toyed with Spotify when back in 2009 but found that having the world's music at my fingertips meant that I was compelled to skip from track to track, always hunting for the next track to listen to, never actually listening. I'd start a song playing, start immediately searching for the next track, and begin playing it before what I was listening to had ended.
When any music you possibly desire is available on tap for next to nothing - at present, Spotify costs in the region of 30p per day of use - the value of what you are listening to is next to nothing as well. There is no reason to persist with a difficult artist, album, or individual song, because the cost of effort is greater than the cost of clicking to the next track.
As streaming services have become more commonplace, I've found myself much more likely to buy the music I want to listen to as a vinyl record. That's not because of the warmth of the sound or the hipsterish feeling that it's the only true way to listen to music; it's precisely because I have to spend some money and therefore have to put in some effort to make my purchase worthwhile.
As new releases invariably come with a free download, I'll often listen to those albums a lot in my car or while out walking and barely play the LP at all. It seems almost perverse - why spend £17 on the FFS album when I've spun the record twice but listened to it digitally a dozen times or more, especially when a download would cost a fiver or so?
Undoubtedly, few people will feel the same. A good album is a good album, no matter how it's acquired. But music is approaching a zero sum game: when it's distributed at almost no cost, how can artists continue to make music in the first place? How can they dare to make something challenging that might be stopped in a few seconds in favour of something easier to listen to?
Apple Music doesn't mean the death of music. But it is symptomatic of the low value that consumers are putting on music right now. Some have complained that limitless access to all the music they could possibly ever listen to or want to listen to isn't worth a tenner a month and expect it to be cheaper. Some revel in gaming Spotify's system and getting student discount so that they pay as little as £5 a month.
"Please let me pay more" is such a strange way to look at this. But I love music, and I want the artists I love to keep making music. £10 for everything does not feel like a fair return. To many, it'll seem fine. In the meantime, I'll keep paying a premium to ensure that music maintains that feel of a premium product.