I was very fortunate to see Rodney Crowell perform on October 26 at City Winery, where he played the song Song for Life. I knew the song, but I had only heard it from Alison Krauss’s album Too Late to Cry. I hadn’t realized, until he said so, that he had written it.
Once I got home, I asked ChatGPT and I asked Apple’s Private Cloud Compute which other songs has Alison Krauss recorded that Rodney Crowell wrote. ChatGPT got it, but Apple’s PCC… Sigh.
All of the issues surrounding Apple, the one that’s the least consequential yet bugs me the most, is Apple’s lack of caring about music. I am sure there are some folks at Apple who could lay out the business case that Apple Music works just fine for most of the people most of the time, all the while returning a healthy profit. But, man, it’s just not great.
I admit I don’t have the answers, but wow is the service not great. Apple Music should be responsible for too many people getting lost in their day listening to and reading about music. I don’t think I mean reviews1, but I know I do mean biographies. I do mean influences. I do mean collaborations. I do mean which songs were written by X and performed by Y.
I will never use Spotify, but from what I’ve read, it’s supposed to be a better service. I used to think Pandora was pretty good, but for some reason I’ve drifted away from that.
I guess I wish my complaint was that Apple Music was too expensive, not that it’s mid. I really do wish I lost hours from using Apple Music. Instead, I have to ask ChatGPT for answers2 that Apple’s PCC can’t answer. Let me clarify that: Can’t answer correctly. Like all LLMs, it answers. Oh boy does it answer.
Apple has decided it can’t afford3 to make Apple Music the envy of the industry. Or it doesn’t care enough about music to bother with it.
I get it, lots of services we all use are often good enough. Apple deciding that’s a camp it wants to be in is what’s worrying.