A New (Old) Musical Home

As I wait out some morning storms before I head over the gym, it seems like the ideal moment to share (or at least start the post that shares) my latest music project.

For months I’ve been thinking about writing a lengthy post about how I don’t upend my digital life as often as I used to. People close to me experienced this when I changed my email address, moved where I published our family pictures, or even adjusted where this site was located far too often. A pain in the ass to you, I knew. But, dammit, I needed to try all the cool digital toys that were available!

This nomadic quality was more apparent if you were to look over my shoulder and see how I interacted with my Macs on a daily basis. I’d switch text editing apps each time a new one dropped. Digital junkdrawer apps came and went even more frequently. A new browser drops? Of course I’m going to import all my bookmarks and give it a shot. And so on. If there was a buzzy new app, I was going to give it a shot, no matter the headaches it caused through moving files around and changing workflows.

I’m not sure exactly when, but at some point I stopped doing this. Or at least slowed it way down. This site has looked the same for, what, 5–6–7 years now? I did switch hosts at one point because of access issues with a previous provider, but I don’t think any of you noticed that unless you tried to check in right when I was moving things around. And I’ve been parked at this URL since right around when we moved into this house, I believe.

Same for the apps I use on a daily basis. I’ll occasionally try something new that I read a review of. But, more often than not, I go back to the ones I’ve been using for years.

Is this all because I’m getting old and don’t like change? Or don’t have the patience to deal with all the extra baggage that comes with switching around constantly? Or have apps largely coalesced around a common set of design language and functions so one really is like the other, compared to back when I ran multiple different podcatching apps that did very different things?

I think we can blame the rise of the iPhone/iOS for some of this as well. I want to be able to accomplish the same tasks the same ways on different devices. It’s harder to switch around when testing something on the Mac breaks how I do things on my phone.

There’s your standard, long-ass introduction to my actual point: for the past two weeks I’ve been testing Apple Music with the goal of switching to it from Spotify.

Big news!

I’m not sure when I first started using Spotify. Somewhere in the range of 10–11 years ago, I guess. Rdio was the first streaming service I used, and to this day nothing has matched its community discovery aspect. When it started to circle the drain, I tried Apple Music. I was deep in the Apple world already and all my old iTunes files would seamlessly blend in.

The only real problem with Apple Music at the time was that it totally sucked. I would listen to a playlist on my iPhone then the next time I used my Mac, there would be two versions of that playlist. Then go back to the iPhone and a third would pop up. I was never really sure why this happened, but it was infuriating.

After a few months of this I bailed for Spotify and never looked back. Spotify, to use an Apple phrase, just worked. And for several years they seemed to have a better selection of music than Apple.

I’ve had no qualms with how Spotify worked since then, although I do have issues with some of their business practices. There were things I wish it did better, but for the most part it did its job.

Every so often I get an offer for a free month of Apple Music. Several times I’ve spent about 10 minutes dicking around on AM before deciding it was too much work to jump. Plus our girls all love Spotify and I couldn’t convince them that their playlists could be copied over to AM easily.

So what changed? Last month I got a new iPhone. With it came the normal offers for free Apple services. The one that grabbed my attention was the Apple One service. I already paid for a higher iCloud storage tier. What attracted me was the access to Apple News+, which would get me behind the paywall of several good magazines and newspapers. I pay for Apple Arcade a few times a year for the girls, and that would roll into it, as well. We would have constant access to Apple TV+ instead of buying it only when shows we like are new. Plus my iCloud storage would take another jump up. Apple Music would be an easy swap for Spotify as part of this process.

I crunched the numbers and once the free trial was over, while I would be paying Apple quite a bit more, the value proposition aspect worked.

Thus I signed up for the free trial and spent an entire weekend getting all my Spotify songs and playlists into Apple Music.[1]

The first thing that struck me was how much AM is still built on the old iTunes architecture. Most notably you can rate songs and make smart playlists based off of all kinds of user selected options. That’s how I interacted with my library the first 12–13 years of the digital music era. It felt like being home again.

At the same time it pissed me off my music geek brain that I had spent so long on Spotify. That was over a decade of play counts, ratings, and other data that was just lost since Spotify didn’t track any of. At least publicly. Suddenly the nearly 4000 songs in my library were all brand new.[2] It’s going to take a few weeks/months to get each track played a few times so the smart playlists can start doing their magic.

For all the annoyance that comes with that process, that is exactly why I think I’m going to stick with Apple Music. Because Spotify lacks those two key features, I find older music gets lost in the shuffle. Literally. Unless I’m listening to an album, I almost always listen in shuffle mode. Because I can’t tease out songs that are old and haven’t been played for a while via smart playlists, or force it to select songs I like the most, it seems to focus on the newer tracks I’m listening to more often. Which makes sense, but also takes away some of the magic that iTunes had by always inserting cool old songs in the midst of new ones.

There have been growing pains. In Spotify adding a song to a playlist does not automatically put it into your library. For example, I kept all my Christmas music in distinct playlists that are hidden away 11 months of the year without adding them to my Liked Songs. So I never get random holiday tunes included when I am shuffling. In Apple Music, tracks are either in your library or not. On the Mac I can uncheck all those holiday songs and they get skipped over. But to the cloud they are still in my library. So listening on my phone, iPad, or in the car can bring those unwelcome surprises of songs meant for December.

It was also enraging that I had to download a separate app to control Apple Music across devices. If I am playing Spotify on my Mac, I can open their app on my phone, see what is playing, control the song, volume, and which speaker the audio is going to natively. I had to do a ton of research, download a separate app, then jump through a bunch of hoops with my Apple account before I could mimic that in Apple Music.

I also had to dive deep into some settings in all that mucking about to get play counts to track across devices. That probably seems dumb to 99.9% of you. My Smart Playlists rely heavily on play count information, so not being able to track those across different devices hampers their effectiveness.

You really would expect that Apple Music would be the service that worked seamlessly across devices and Spotify be the one that took the extra work to build this system.

The Tesla AM app is also a little wonky. Certainly less reliable than Spotify. Both have their quirks in connecting to the network, but Apple Music is more likely to get stuck in a loop where it only loads a few songs and loops back to the first rather than continuing to work through the playlist/library.[3]

The past two weeks I’ve been trying to remember how I organized my music all those years ago in the iTunes era. What were my favorite smart playlists? How did I rate songs? And so on. The goal is to create a Daily playlist that splits the difference between the newest music in my library and older tracks. I think I have the rules adjusted close to how I had them 15 years ago, but, again, I’m going to need to work through my library a few times to make sure they are where I want them to be. Songs I haven’t heard in ages that are indeed popping up, which is good. Hopefully the benefits like that outweigh the annoyances where Apple Music does not match Spotify.

How will this affect you, my loyal readers/listeners? Hopefully not at all. Other than reading this blog post. The girls have talked me into letting them stay on Spotify. Which means I am paying for two music streaming services. The benefit to you is that I can continue to share my Friday Playlists from Spotify, something that is not possible in Apple Music. I’ll build them in AM over the course of the week. Then on Friday mornings I’ll launch Spotify, quickly pull those songs together and insert that playlist into WordPress as I’ve been doing for years.