At its heart, Apple Music is a simple proposition. For your monthly subscription fee, Apple will offer you access to a library of over 30 million tracks. You can listen, explore, and discover to your heart's content, and you can take that music with you wherever you go. But subscribing to Apple Music and making full use of the streaming service requires a sacrifice.
You have to hand over control of your iTunes music library to Apple and hope that Cupertino's arrogance will preserve your music collection.
Part of the attraction of Apple Music is the ability to download tracks and playlists to your device for offline listening. This keeps the cost down of streaming over cellular data when you are out and about, and allows you to listen to Apple Music tracks when you are out of coverage.
These options are only available if you turn on iCloud Music - a service that mirrors much (but not all) of iTunes Match. You local library will be shadowed into the cloud and will be available to other devices. If a track is already in Apple's database then it will simply be copied in the cloud to your account, and unknown tracks will be uploaded to facilitate access.
Because Apple Music is a cloud based service, adding favourite tracks and playlists in Apple Music will add them to your collection in the cloud. If you don't turn on Apple Music, you don't have access to your musical cloud record, and the only way to listen to the music is to stream tracks while online. No offline copies, no playlists, and no bookmarks (just the struggle to remember your favourite albums you've recently been listening to).
The issue that is upsetting many Apple users is that moment when you turn on iCloud Music for the first time and your tracks are synced to the cloud. Apple's methodology on this is not clear, but from reports and feedback from users across the internet, it appears that Apple's view of metadata and what the 'correct' track is, will take precedence over your custom edits.
The Verge's Chris Welch highlights his preference of listening to early tracks from The Beatles in mono format (just as they were recorded) rather than the automatic matching services' preferences for stereo versions. Support forums talk of collections approaching 20,00 songs becoming corrupted and full of duplicate entries, incorrect meta-data overwriting current entries, album art switched out to show the wrong albums, and more stories of personal pain. My experience hit an issue straight away with Grammy-nominated Italian rock-noir band 'Belladonna' and Nu-Jazz performer Maurizio Belladonna being seen as single artists. The accuracy of the service is dependant on the accuracy of Apple's master library, not the time you have spent editing your own music.
When you have spent time collating every song that has appeared in the Eurovision Song Contest, when you have hunted down an obscure studio tracks of Nova singing the Melodifestivalen version of 'Sommaren som aldrig säger nej', when you have a playlist of UK number ones and the metadata holds all the chart information, to have Apple run roughshod over these because it has what it thinks is a 'better' version of 'Lapponia' on the server is nothing short of incredibly poor user design and customer satisfaction.
Next page... other subscription services have solved this problem.
People have a huge emotional connection to music, and that includes how they navigate and curate their music collections. For some it is Ikea's Expidet shelving units that would accommodate 12" vinyl records, for the digital generation it is the indexing, tagging, cover art and metadata attached to their music collections.
Music fans looking to make best use of Apple Music are being asked to gamble their intimate information away in the hope that Apple's servers will not disrupt their data with no guarantee that any changes made can be undone.
And every time the music app is opened, every time a playlist is engaging, every time an album has been uncovered, every time Zane Lowe and Beats 1 highlights an interesting track, the gamble is presented once more in an insistent dialog box.
(l) Two acts called 'Belladonna' scrambled together. (r) iCloud Music wants to be turned on... will... [+]
The disappointment for me is the 'all or nothing' nature of this choice. I have a rather eclectic collection of music on my desktop that I don't want to risk. iCloud Music on the desktop would likely do just that. iCloud Music on my iPhone would open up the possibility of tracks stored on the smartphone becoming corrupted and then synced back to the desktop library. But I love the discovery process of new music. I've been signed up to a music subscription in some form for almost ten years, and they have all been able to preserve my own music alongside the music from the service, even when they were intermingled on my media player or smartphone music app.
All except Apple. Since the launch of iTunes Match I have heard horror stories and seen countless examples of the matching service running roughshod over a cultivated music collection. And I have kept myself as far away as possible from the potential damage. Now the option to engage in that danger is being offered to me multiple times per day.
Spotify can manage to provide me offline copies without risking any damage to local copies. Microsoft's Xbox Music Pass does not ask me to gamble with my own files to listen, save, playlist, and work with the 'rented' music. Come to think of it, Microsoft had all these problems solved, along with a clear UI that differentiated everything nicely, when the Zune launched. In 2006.
If Microsoft managed to get it right all those years ago, why can't Apple?
(Now read how Apple will have you paying for your music forever).
