I love Apple Music and I’m willing to forgive its flaws

I love Apple Music, even though it has so many flaws that it can feel like condescending to the slightly-deaf, undeniably jerky owner of a brilliant record store as they school you on classic hip hop.

Apple Music’s recommendations are killer, the playlists it serves up scratch the itch more often than not, Beats 1 goes from strength to strength, and the ability to add practically any album I think of to my library feels like magic.

But its problems can be eye-wateringly dumb. For instance, after watching ‘Straight Outta Compton’ for the second time, I wanted to listen to Eazy E’s first album, which I had on CD long ago, but couldn’t find immediately.

Adding it to my library on my Mac was simple but when I made the album available for offline listening on my iPhone, I was suddenly faced with two copies of every track on all my devices. Cue a frustrating deletion exercise.

That leads me to another issue: It’s idiotically tricky to see what music you have made available for offline play and remove tracks you don’t want anymore. That’s particularly annoying if you’re rocking old hardware with limited storage (I’m still on the iPhone 5s, waiting for the September 9 announcement of the new generation phone).

But despite the niggles, the headaches, the outright ridiculous UI and UX choices, I love Apple Music. It’s changed my relationship with listening to music on my Mac and my iPhone. There are as many fun features and good choices as there are terrible design blunders.

Apple didn’t nail it with Apple Music v1.0 and I still desperately want it to put iTunes out of its misery and split the core functions into separate apps. And yet, it’s a product I use daily – despite its occasional refusal to stream certain tracks for no obvious reason and a flakiness on certain Wi-Fi connections – and enjoy playing with.

Apple has a history of first generation products that show a kernel of genius but carry a steam curve of disappointment. I anticipate that Apple Music will only get better and better. If it loses the vestigial tail that is iTunes, all the better.

Note: You’ve got to the bottom of the page and if you’re planning on writing a comment that says “Oh Apple paid you to write this…” If I were on salary from Apple, I’d live in a much nicer house and spend a lot less time arguing with people on the internet. 

I wrote recently about the problems I have with a lot of Apple coverage. It made a lot of Apple fanatics attack me. So, you can’t really win.