Ask an Apple user about Apple products and they will most likely tell you how awesome they are. Poke them a bit more, and they will also tell you the cost of that awesomeness. Depending on its size, colour, and well, awesomeness, an Apple product could set you back anywhere between four thousand rupees and one fully-functional kidney.
Surprisingly, Apple’s latest offering in India is rather cheap. But that’s only because it’s not so much a product as it is a service. Say bonjour to Apple Music, the newest music-streaming service that, internationally, is catching up quickly with big names like Spotify and Tidal. Meanwhile in India, it is up against services like Wynk and Saavn that are primarily aimed at streaming regional music.
I have been using Apple Music for a couple of months now, and I can safely say that it has struck the right note in me. With each passing day, I seem to be using it more. To me, this service is beginning to feel more like a paradigm shift than just another music app. I am starting to believe that this is the way I should have been consuming music all along. Allow me to elaborate.
Pricing
As is the case with many internet users, I ashamedly accept that a sizeable portion of my music has been acquired illicitly. In the last ten or fifteen years, I have managed to amass my hard drives with thousands of albums and songs by either allowing friends to share it with me, or by downloading them off the internet myself. It’s likely that no more than a fifth of my music collection is in the form of purchased CDs.
Frankly, I have never been proud of owning music this way, and I’m glad that the arrival of Apple Music finally changes things, at least by a little. The monthly subscription costs ₹120 for a single user and ₹190 for a family of six users. If we’re honest, that’s a piddly sum compared to the money most of us spend on ad-ridden cable television or internet.
Collection
As something of a music connoisseur, I can confirm that Apple’s collection of music from around the world is quite enormous. I was able to find and stream music from most of my favourite artists. I was left wanting very little outside their collection every time I performed a search. Music unavailable on Apple was either by relatively small artists whose presence was stronger on SoundCloud (like say, Christine and the Queens) or by artists backing Tidal exclusively (Kanye West, Jay-Z, et al.).
A cool feature of Music is that there are tonnes of playlists being created daily by music experts and ‘curators’ that make it easier than ever to try out new artists and genres. Oh you know, there are ones like ‘Intro to Daft Punk’ or ‘Frank Sinatra: Swings’. These playlists are suggested to the user based on their tastes and choices. There are even some activity-based playlists to set the mood right for whatever you’re currently doing. So, whether you’re riding the bus with the other dead people on a drizzly Monday morning or leaving work on a promising Friday evening to meet your mates, Apple’s got you covered.
Hip-hop devotees will bemoan Apple’s thoughtless style of bleeping ‘explicit’ lyrics wherein they’ve only managed to cut out some expletives but completely missed out on what the rest of the lyrics may mean or suggest. You’re better off not using Music for this one genre, if you ask me.
Apple Music for Android
This is Apple’s first real app for Android and it’s been in Beta ever since its launch in November last year. Four months on, you can easily tell the app still needs a lot of improvement.
It works all right for the most part, but there are a few of those persistent glitches that can make the app unusable on the whole at times. I’m talking about sudden crashes and abrupt halts in playback. If you’re behind the wheel and have to constantly check your phone to take care of an adamant music app, that’s bound to drive you up the wall (along with your car, if you know what I mean).
It’s not all bad news though because the app allows offline storage of downloaded music and that’s just the right ticket for many users (myself included) who like to use their data plans frugally and bank on WiFi networks more.
The most useful improvement arrived a couple of weeks ago in the form of SD card support for phones equipped with a microSD card slot. Most cards go up to a capacity of 128 GB these days and that means that you can carry a lot of tunes with you for the road.
I have about a couple of hundred songs stored offline on my Apple Music app now, and I must say that I am quite happy with the setup. Every other day, I spend a little time in the morning downloading the music I want for the road and play it offline in the car through Bluetooth.
Here are some strange bugs I've noticed so far - a few songs that played perfectly well offline in the morning refused to play in the evening (demanding that it be connected to the internet to play), some sudden disappearances of album arts (for no apparent reason), and pixelation of some icons within the app (that stick out like a bloody sore thumb). You’ll come across such vagaries and then some for the time being, but I do hope Apple’s working hard at fine-tuning them. Still, I get the strange feeling this app’s never getting out of Beta.
Conclusion
All things considered, Apple Music is worth subscribing to if you have had enough of playing pirate and want to plunge into the Netflix era of music. The first three months are free anyway. Earlier on, I may have overstated when I said Apple Music feels like a paradigm shift, but if you’re a user like me you’ll come to understand why I said that. With Apple Music, I no longer have to go to the bother of downloading a song and copying it to a million flash drives and devices. Who’d have ever imagined the route out of piracy to be this easy and this cheap?
On PC/Mac, you can access Apple Music through iTunes. On Android mobile phones (ver. 5.0 and up), you can get the buggy Beta app that is slightly senile. On Android tablet devices, it simply doesn’t exist. And on iOS devices, you can get the stable version of the app but I can’t comment on it because I don’t really own Apple devices save for a few old iPods and they don’t support music via er, Music. But if I ever come across a one-kidneyed iPhone/iPad user who uses Music, I’ll be sure to ask about their experience.
Until next time…
Vignesh
Surprisingly, Apple’s latest offering in India is rather cheap. But that’s only because it’s not so much a product as it is a service. Say bonjour to Apple Music, the newest music-streaming service that, internationally, is catching up quickly with big names like Spotify and Tidal. Meanwhile in India, it is up against services like Wynk and Saavn that are primarily aimed at streaming regional music.
I have been using Apple Music for a couple of months now, and I can safely say that it has struck the right note in me. With each passing day, I seem to be using it more. To me, this service is beginning to feel more like a paradigm shift than just another music app. I am starting to believe that this is the way I should have been consuming music all along. Allow me to elaborate.
Pricing
As is the case with many internet users, I ashamedly accept that a sizeable portion of my music has been acquired illicitly. In the last ten or fifteen years, I have managed to amass my hard drives with thousands of albums and songs by either allowing friends to share it with me, or by downloading them off the internet myself. It’s likely that no more than a fifth of my music collection is in the form of purchased CDs.
Frankly, I have never been proud of owning music this way, and I’m glad that the arrival of Apple Music finally changes things, at least by a little. The monthly subscription costs ₹120 for a single user and ₹190 for a family of six users. If we’re honest, that’s a piddly sum compared to the money most of us spend on ad-ridden cable television or internet.
Collection
As something of a music connoisseur, I can confirm that Apple’s collection of music from around the world is quite enormous. I was able to find and stream music from most of my favourite artists. I was left wanting very little outside their collection every time I performed a search. Music unavailable on Apple was either by relatively small artists whose presence was stronger on SoundCloud (like say, Christine and the Queens) or by artists backing Tidal exclusively (Kanye West, Jay-Z, et al.).
A cool feature of Music is that there are tonnes of playlists being created daily by music experts and ‘curators’ that make it easier than ever to try out new artists and genres. Oh you know, there are ones like ‘Intro to Daft Punk’ or ‘Frank Sinatra: Swings’. These playlists are suggested to the user based on their tastes and choices. There are even some activity-based playlists to set the mood right for whatever you’re currently doing. So, whether you’re riding the bus with the other dead people on a drizzly Monday morning or leaving work on a promising Friday evening to meet your mates, Apple’s got you covered.
Hip-hop devotees will bemoan Apple’s thoughtless style of bleeping ‘explicit’ lyrics wherein they’ve only managed to cut out some expletives but completely missed out on what the rest of the lyrics may mean or suggest. You’re better off not using Music for this one genre, if you ask me.
Apple Music for Android
This is Apple’s first real app for Android and it’s been in Beta ever since its launch in November last year. Four months on, you can easily tell the app still needs a lot of improvement.
It works all right for the most part, but there are a few of those persistent glitches that can make the app unusable on the whole at times. I’m talking about sudden crashes and abrupt halts in playback. If you’re behind the wheel and have to constantly check your phone to take care of an adamant music app, that’s bound to drive you up the wall (along with your car, if you know what I mean).
It’s not all bad news though because the app allows offline storage of downloaded music and that’s just the right ticket for many users (myself included) who like to use their data plans frugally and bank on WiFi networks more.
The most useful improvement arrived a couple of weeks ago in the form of SD card support for phones equipped with a microSD card slot. Most cards go up to a capacity of 128 GB these days and that means that you can carry a lot of tunes with you for the road.
I have about a couple of hundred songs stored offline on my Apple Music app now, and I must say that I am quite happy with the setup. Every other day, I spend a little time in the morning downloading the music I want for the road and play it offline in the car through Bluetooth.
Here are some strange bugs I've noticed so far - a few songs that played perfectly well offline in the morning refused to play in the evening (demanding that it be connected to the internet to play), some sudden disappearances of album arts (for no apparent reason), and pixelation of some icons within the app (that stick out like a bloody sore thumb). You’ll come across such vagaries and then some for the time being, but I do hope Apple’s working hard at fine-tuning them. Still, I get the strange feeling this app’s never getting out of Beta.
Conclusion
All things considered, Apple Music is worth subscribing to if you have had enough of playing pirate and want to plunge into the Netflix era of music. The first three months are free anyway. Earlier on, I may have overstated when I said Apple Music feels like a paradigm shift, but if you’re a user like me you’ll come to understand why I said that. With Apple Music, I no longer have to go to the bother of downloading a song and copying it to a million flash drives and devices. Who’d have ever imagined the route out of piracy to be this easy and this cheap?
On PC/Mac, you can access Apple Music through iTunes. On Android mobile phones (ver. 5.0 and up), you can get the buggy Beta app that is slightly senile. On Android tablet devices, it simply doesn’t exist. And on iOS devices, you can get the stable version of the app but I can’t comment on it because I don’t really own Apple devices save for a few old iPods and they don’t support music via er, Music. But if I ever come across a one-kidneyed iPhone/iPad user who uses Music, I’ll be sure to ask about their experience.
Until next time…
Vignesh
