How I Use Apple Music

In my effort to listen to the greatest 500 albums of all time, I joined Apple Music. I've had issues with streaming services in the past as they felt like a bit of a mess. The mess led to a feeling that the only real option was to fall into one of its feeds and not control my music.

I found I can avoid this with the way Apple Music is set up. In the past, I kind of avoided the Library feature and accepted some defaults, which auto-added songs and albums to the Library. This made things not so good. What I'm doing now is treating the online catalog as if it were a giant record store.

The first step was creating a new Library by holding down Option while launching Music on macOS. This creates what should be an empty Library, except it auto-loads all your past purchases (gross). All these purchases can get deleted, which hides them away. You can still get them back if wanted in the future (though it's a bit buried away in your profile). I had previously also downloaded all the purchased music I actually wanted and backed it up in a couple of places, so I'm not too worried about this.

At this point, you have a Music app with nothing in it, perfect. But wait, there is a little more to do. In the Music Settings on iOS, there are toggles to auto-add playlist songs and favorite songs to the Library. I turned both these off, as they will just make a mess. I want my Library to be 100% intentional.

Now, when I want to listen to a new album, I head to the "store". I find the album in Apple Music, then add it to my Library. Only once it's in my Library do I actually listen to it. If I like what I hear, the album can stay. If I don't like it, or it's not something I would actually buy, I delete it (return it to the "store").

This makes it feel like I'm still managing my own Library, which is something I always enjoyed about music, while still having access to everything. On my mission to listen to all these albums, I can add a few albums at a time to my Library, listen to them at my leisure, then decide their fate.

It took me a long time to really "get it" with Apple Music, but now that I found this workflow, I quite like it. As much as I tried different things with Spotify and YouTube Music, everything always felt like a mess with little hope of bringing order to the madness. While my new workflow may seem old-school and antiquated, I find there is a certain charm and nostalgia in picking out albums in this way. Getting to know the artist, by listening to their work in the way they wanted, also seems much better than random auto-generated playlists where I have no idea who any of the artists are… it could all be AI for all I know.

I've already gone outside the 500 list a few times to check out a few newer albums I heard about. I went through the same process of adding the album to my Library, listening to it, and then either keeping or removing it. It makes it feel like I'm borrowing it from the library or a friend to see what I think before committing. I always used to shy away from using "Delete from Library" in the past, as it seemed so final, but it's not. I'm getting more comfortable with deleting albums, which makes it OK to add them just for a listen or two.

All of this prevents me from being overloaded by the endless choice when going into Apple Music's Home or New areas. Those areas are more like the choice one feels when walking into a record store, which is temporary. Then you make your choices, and go home to your small locally library that is manageable and not so overwhelming.

I revamped this site. I deleted the old ttbp blog and am just posting on the main page here. It seems easier and more portable.

For now, all posts will simply load. At some point I may limit how many posts actually show up on the home page. If that happens, I'm unsure if I'll make an archive for past posts or not. I kind of like the idea of whatever is here being a snapshot in time without an exhaustive public history.

I've fallen in the trap where I stopped listening to new music for a long time and just listen to what I listened to back in high school and college, with a few exceptions. To help break that and expand my horizons, I'm going to make it a point to bring music back into my life. I'm starting with the 500 greatest albums of all time, as judged by Rolling Stone. As far as the rankings go, I think the list has a lot of problems, but with 500 albums, it also can't be all bad as a whole and is sure to push me out of my comfort zone.

I think I need to listen to each album a few times. We tend to like what's familiar, so it could take a few listens to really "get" a certain artist or album. I want to give them a fair chance. I saw someone else talk about listening to this list, and they not only didn't listen to things more than once, but they allowed themselves some skips... and they skipped some absolute bangers.

I just finished up my first listen of What's Going On by Marvin Gaye to start things off. I went with Apple Music to find all this and am glad I did. When I looked at YouTube Music and Spotify they had new "deluxe" releases, where Apple Music still had the 1971 original. I assume this trend would have played out throughout the whole list, which would have driven me crazy on other services. I don't need 5 remixes of the single to sully a classic album I'm trying to listen to on repeat.

There seems to be a trend toward retro tech and more simple living. However, it seems as time goes on it becomes harder to keep this retro tech going. Support is dropped, intigrations removed, parts are no longer made, workflows are changed. At what point does it become more complex to try to live a simple life? When simple becomes complex and complex is the modern default, where do we go? What do we do?

I'm just realizing at nearly 5pm that today is Sunday and the weekend is almost over. I went to a baseball game yesterday and while that is typically something a person might do on the weekend, I feel like I lost a day of rest before the work week starts again.