If You Paid for Beats, Apple Music Is a Broken Promise

So I tried this yesterday, and I think the article's a bit over the top. I'm not surprised the transition may take a little while. 24 hours does not seem like too long to wait(!)

First reactions:

* Really cool to have your streaming library integrated with your regular library, but probably only a big deal for people who already have big iTunes collections.

* Beats 1 is surprisingly really good. There's just something fun about the human element, and the idea of a 'worldwide' radio station is really neat. Brings out the humanist in me.

* UI is still a bit confused, especially in iTunes. iTunes has been confused for a while now. I don't think they've quite figured out how best to offer streaming and the iTunes Store side by side yet. (And the multi-mode UI is just crazy. You're looking at your music, and you want to see the iTunes Movies Store? You have to click 'Movies' icon first to switch to the movies view, and then the 'iTunes Store' button. The iTunes Store itself is just plain bad. It feels so old and slow.)

* All in all, a lot of potential but lots of kinks to work out. It's good enough to cancel my Spotify subscription, but it's not quite there yet.

My personal thoughts:

* You should be able to listen to Beats 1 on apple.com (or wherever) without a device. I'm sure it'd get a lot more people listening, and more importantly would get a lot more people talking about it, and the service.

* Beats 1 needs more dedicated UI; a way to see previous songs, a way to see a list of songs you've hearted, a way to see whatever the DJ is posting on Connect/Twitter/whatever.

* Connect shows promise, but it's a pain to navigate on an iPhone 5 screen. Again, you really need to be able to access Connect online, and the more integration with existing social networks the better. You can't be social if there's an activation barrier (downloading iTunes, creating yet another account, whatever) to access it. It seems like Connect is a service that the labels asked for anyway, so presumably they'd be happy to have more people see it.

Really cool start though.

Am I missing something, or is this a really whiny and pointless article? As the author himself quotes Apple in the conclusion, "Your recommendations and music library move to Apple Music in the background".

So... what's the problem? Give it a few hours and your library should migrate over automatically. Or am I missing something? Is this entire article complaining that the UI didn't make it clear enough that everything was being automatically transferred?

To counter all the comments dismissing this as "whiny": if it bothered this guy enough to write a 1000 word blog post about it, think about all the people who didn't write blog posts.

First impressions, especially from existing customers, are extremely important. The bitter taste of disappointment lingers long after the novelty wears off. "Details" like this matter.

Summary: Apple pushes over your library from Beats within 24h and some guy thinks that sucks.

I'm not sure I get it.

He has to wait up to 24 hours for the batch job to port his music to the new system and the UI does not make it clear.

He found about it in the FAQ, though.

Is that all?

I'm mostly a fan of Apple Music, but the onboarding has been weird - it's been years since I've touched iTunes, so it was annoying to find that they've added a lot of singles by buzz bands to my iTunes library that now need to be deleted from my Apple Music library.

But I mostly rate it a few notches above Spotify. The clean native UI and Siri integration are huge winners for me. I'm hopeful that Apple will be the first streaming service that can handle a big (15 Gb+) library of downloaded music without becoming buggy. As a classical fan, it's a dream come true - they actually handle composer information with care (a legacy of iTunes, I imagine). In Spotify, the composer's name is routinely jammed into the track title, often hiding crucial track information.