i have a bone to pick with apple music
probably the least interesting thing ive ever written on here
i've refrained from speaking about this publicly because i have (through a consumer choice i was not, at the time, thrilled to be making) been made to be an apple music user and, thusly, defender.
when you tell people that you use apple music instead of spotify they look at you and ask you the type of questions one receives when they say they have an android phone (do not worry, i have an iphone). being a proud user of the apple music streaming service is roughly about as socially acceptable as not knowing basically anything about the most recent spat of HBO shows (i have many afflictions).
for the record, i switched from spotify to apple music in 2016 because i had reached the 10,000 song limit in my library, which meant that whenever i wanted to add new music to my spotify library i had to delete some. i to this day do not understand why they employ a draconian capacity on their music offerings. maybe they’ve changed the policy since then. not going to find out as it is no longer my problem. the process of switching your 10,000+ song library over to a new streaming service is tremendously tedious and i cannot in good faith recommend that anyone do the same even though apple music is a better product top to bottom. the sound quality is noticeably better and the UI is not designed by morons who hate you.
but anyhoo i have a complaint about apple music. a couple months ago they did a redesign. this is standard operating procedure for any app on a phone and at first it looks and feels weird and annoying but then after two days you get used to it and forget what the old version looked and felt like and when you see screenshots of years-old versions of the app it looks like it was made by the flintstones even though it was 2022 back then. part of using the phone is getting used to these things as quickly and subconsciously as possible.
but for some reason apple did this thing where now if you add a song to your queue it gets permanently thumb tacked there until you manually clear it. for example: i am listening to a song, say "mania" by pangaea. i go to add a song to play next, say "no expectations" by two-man giant squid. and perhaps another song after that, maybe "circuits" by simo cell. wow, great sequencing ryan these are some serious tunes. thank you you're welcome.
"circuits" ends and i look to fill the silence by listening to the entirety of stereolab's new album "instant holograms on metal film." i click on that album, the first song plays, woohoo im listening to the new stereolab. but then after the first track my stupid fucking phone reverts to the previously queued songs and will then play "no expectations" and "circuits" and then none of the rest of the songs remaining on the stereolab. how can this possibly be useful to anyone?!? so now if you've queued anything recently, when you decide to listen to something else you have to reopen your queue and clear it. really stupid stuff! even stupider than writing a blog post about it especially since i would guess two and a half of you even use apple music. and the tactile experience of using your phone and seeing the stimuli is, im finding, hard to convey with the written word. i would assume this is about as impenetrable as if i started talking about my fantasy baseball teams on here (do not worry. i will never do that not even as a threat) but that's just the way of the world i suppose. happy friday im bored "at work" if you can't tell.
