Stream Apple Music
The world of music has changed in recent years. People are slowly shifting from owning their music—buying CDs or downloads—to renting it. With Apple Music and other streaming services, you can now access tens of millions of tracks for $10 a month. While not every artist or label’s music can be streamed, you can access most of what you want to hear. But is this the best way to spend your music budget? Some people—myself included—still buy CDs and still want to own music and listen on our own terms.
While much of what I explained about playing music in the previous chapter also applies to Apple Music, in this chapter, I look at Apple Music and explain how it works, plus how you can find great music and help Apple Music recommend new music for you to discover.
Discover Apple Music
Apple Music is Apple’s streaming music service, which combines several features:
Music streaming: You can stream more than 50 million tracks from the Apple Music Library. Much of the music that’s for sale in the iTunes Store is in this library, but not all. You can stream tracks on demand, such as a song or album, or you can stream playlists curated by Apple Music editors and contributors. See Stream Apple Music.
Cloud storage: You can store up to 100,000 tracks in your Cloud Music Library. If you enable cloud sync of your music library, the Music app checks each track in your library to see whether it can “match” a track that’s already in the Apple Music Library. If a track doesn’t match, it’s uploaded. These tracks show in your Cloud Music Library along with tracks you’ve purchased from the iTunes Store and those you’ve downloaded from Apple Music. See Use Cloud Music Library
For You music recommendations: With 50 million tracks to choose from, you can have that kid-in-a-candy-store feeling, where you want to stream everything but don’t know where to start. Apple Music’s For You feature can help you choose what to listen to. See Personalize Apple Music.
Radio: Beats 1 is the marquee streaming radio station on Apple Music, but there are a few dozen others. You can also create an Apple Music Radio station from any song, artist, or genre. See Listen to Apple Music Radio
An individual subscription costs $9.99 per month, and a family plan, available to groups using Apple’s Family Sharing, costs $14.99 per month for up to six people. If you subscribe or renew an individual plan for one year, it’s only $99, saving you the cost of two months, but there is no discounted annual membership for those with family plans. A half-price student subscription is also available, after you have submitted proof that you are a student. (Prices are different outside the United States.)
If you don’t subscribe, you can access a subset of Apple Music features.
Turn On Apple Music
To turn on Apple Music, follow these steps:
Click one of the three entries under the Apple Music header in the sidebar: For You, Browse, or Radio.
Click Try it Free (or whatever option Apple happens to be offering), and follow the prompts.
A lot of the benefit of Apple Music kicks in if you turn on Cloud Music Library. To learn about that, read Use Cloud Music Library.
Once you’ve turned on Apple Music, set up the For You recommendation feature, which I discuss next.
Personalize Apple Music
You have your favorites, and you may want to start by listening to them right away. Or you may want to think back to music from years past and check out some of the tunes you grew up with. An advantage of being able to access more than 50 million tracks is the ability to listen to almost anything you want. But you can also discover new artists or composers with Apple Music’s For You recommendation service.
When you first subscribe to Apple Music, you’re asked to choose a few genres and artists so Apple Music can recommend music to you. You can also choose friends to follow, if they subscribe to Apple Music, and see what they listen to. When you’re finished, the For You screen displays its initial recommendations.
Discover Music on Apple Music
Apple Music’s For You recommendation feature displays recommendations based on the genres and artists you selected when you joined Apple Music (discussed just previously), music you’ve purchased from the iTunes Store, and music you listen to. The recommendations are refined as you listen to music, and, especially when you “love” or “dislike” songs (explained in the next two topics).
Figure 24 shows my For You content on a day in October 2019.
The first thing you see in For You is a section containing “mixes.” These are created by algorithm, based on your friends and the music you listen to. Currently, there are four mixes:
Favorites Mix is a selection of tracks that you’ve listened to a lot and/or loved.
Friends Mix is a selection of tracks your friends have listened to, if you have followed anyone. (I explain how to do this in Follow Friends on Apple Music.)
Chill Mix is a selection of relaxing music, picked from multiple genres. It may include jazz or ambient music, dub or classical, or other types of downtempo tunes.
New Music Mix is a playlist of recommended new releases, in the genres you have selected, and by artists you like, but also by artists Apple thinks you will like.
Each of these mixes updates once a week, and each one shows which day it updates.
If you scroll down in the For You section, you’ll see the following (as of October 2019; Apple may change this layout in the future):
Recently Played: The albums, playlists, and radio stations you’ve listened to recently, so you can go back and play them again.
Friends Are Listening To: This shows what your friends have been listening to recently.
Selections by artist or genre: For You offers a number of music selections by artist and genre. For example, I see Rock, Ambient, More by the Grateful Dead, Instrumental Music, and more. These selections include albums and playlists, and depend on the music you listen to, and the music you add to your library.
New Releases: This section displays new albums you might want to listen to. In some cases, these are albums by artists I know and love, but others are music that I never listen to (which suggests paid placement of new releases, perhaps). But I have discovered some artists and albums I wasn’t familiar with in this section.
To play an album or playlist, hover over any block and click its Play 
button.
To learn more about an album or playlist, click its name. In the case of a playlist, you see all the songs, with a bit of editorial introduction and links to artists whose music it contains. To play the album or playlist, hover over the artwork and click the Play button. To play any individual track, hover over it and click.
Love Your Favorite Music on Apple Music
The key to refining your Apple Music recommendations is “loving” tracks you like. Each time you find a track, album, or playlist you like, click the More 
icon and choose Love to help Apple Music refine its recommendations. You can also select any song or album and choose Song > Love.
Tell Apple Music What You Don’t Like
Apple Music recommends a lot of music, and you may not like it all; to refine your recommendations, Loves are good, but so are Dislikes. (Don’t worry, Apple Music won’t be insulted if you dislike a lot of what it suggests.) You can give feedback in the Music app: just click or tap the More icon next to any album or playlist recommendation and choose Dislike. If you dislike a track you’ve accidentally loved, then the loved rating will go away and vice versa.
Follow Friends on Apple Music
It’s one thing to find music on Apple Music, but it’s even better if you can see what your friends are listening to and discover new artists, albums, and playlists that they’ve been enjoying. Not only does Apple Music For You have a section showing what Friends Are Listening To, but if you follow a few friends, you also see the Friends Mix, which I described above.
To share your listening history and follow friends, do the following:
In Music > Preferences > Playback, check Use Listening History. This lets Apple Music share this history with others, but also helps refine your For You recommendations.
In Apple Music For You, click your photo or avatar near the top of the pane.
Click Edit. Here, you can enter your name, a username, and you can choose who can follow your activity. If you want anyone to be able to follow you, select Everyone; if not, select People You Approve, and you’ll have to authorize each person who wants to follow you.
You can also change your photo or avatar by clicking the camera icon in the circle to the right of the window (see Figure 25).
Click Done to save your changes.
After you click Done, you’ll be on your main profile page, which shows playlists you’ve created, people you follow, and people following you. You can click the More 
button and choose Share Profile to share your profile with your friends. You can copy a link to your profile, which you can send to friends, or you can send the link via email or Messages. If you’re curious about my eclectic musical tastes, free to follow me; I’m @mcelhearn.
Add Apple Music Tracks to Your Library
With an Apple Music subscription, if you’ve turned on Cloud Music Library (see Store Your Music Library in the Cloud for more on storing your music in the cloud), you can add any music in the Apple Music Library to the cloud. Once you’ve added it, you can listen to it again offline and add it to playlists, and you can listen to it on any Apple devices you are signed in to (and even Android devices, if you have the Apple Music app). These tunes remain available as long as your Apple Music subscription is active.
To add an album or playlist to your music library, click the Add 
button next to it (Figure 26). You can also add an individual track by clicking the plus 
icon in the track’s listing.
button.To remove an Apple Music track from the cloud, whether you’ve downloaded it or not, Control-click it or click its More 
icon, and choose Delete from Library. The track is removed from your Cloud Music Library and all the devices linked to your account.
Download Music for Offline Listening
Once you’ve added an Apple Music album, playlist, or track to the cloud, as I discussed just above, you can download it. This allows you to listen to it without an internet connection—and to avoid hiccups over a slow connection.
To download an item, find and click its Download 
icon. In Albums view, for example, the Download icon appears on the album artwork when you hover your pointer over it and near the right of the album’s header bar, as well as in each track (Figure 27).
icon at bottom of the album’s artwork.You’ll see these cloud icons in other spots as well: to the right of an album’s or playlist’s name in various views, or to the right of track names. You’ll also see them in a column in Songs view (see Songs View), and you can Control-Click items in any view and choose Download from the contextual menu.
Listen to Apple Music Radio
Apple Music Radio plays music from Apple’s enormous repository of songs and is run by Apple. It also includes a few streaming stations, such as Beats 1, that are run by Apple or that Apple has included, such as ESPN News and Sports, NPR, and BBC World Service. Anyone can listen to Beats 1 and other live radio stations, even without an Apple Music subscription.
Beats 1 has several shows with disc jockeys, and some well-known musicians also run shows where they get to play their favorite tunes. You can see all the shows on Beats 1 on the Apple Music Tumblr.
If you subscribe to Apple Music, you’ll see many more stations, plus you can create your own “radio stations.” These stations sync across your devices; so long as you’re signed in to the same iTunes Store account, you can listen to the same stations on any device—Mac, PC, iOS device, Apple TV, or Apple Watch.
These radio stations are a bit like Genius, but on a larger scale. Instead of comparing a song you select to the contents of your Music library and dishing up a playlist based on that song, Apple Music Radio looks at the millions of tracks available from Apple Music.
To start using Apple Music Radio, select Radio in the sidebar, and then click a station to start listening.
While listening to a song on a radio station that isn’t live, you can pause or restart playback (click the Pause 
icon, or press the Space bar; to start playing again, click the Play 
icon, or press the Space bar). If you’re listening to Beats 1, the toolbar offers a Stop 
icon rather than a pause icon.
If you don’t like the song that’s playing, click the Next 
icon to skip to the next song. You can’t skip ahead in a song; you can only skip to the next song. You can skip as much as you like, but you can’t skip when listening to Beats 1 or any other “live” radio station.
If you’ve turned on Cloud Music Library, you can add any track you’re listening to your library. Hover over a song name in the app header and click the More icon to display a menu (Figure 28), then choose Add to Library or Add to Playlist > Playlist. If you do the latter often, you might want to create a playlist specially for the purpose of adding songs from radio stations so you can go back to them later.
Note that when Beats 1 has interviews with musicians, or when the DJs are talking, the menu shows only Share Station. Once the music returns, you’ll see the full menu.
You can also show the current track in Apple Music or in the iTunes Store, share the song, or create a new radio station based on that song. And, you can use the Love and Dislike options to fine-tune the Apple Music algorithm. This is especially helpful if you play a personal radio station (see just below) and want to ensure that it plays the music you want to hear.
Make Custom Radio Stations
Your Apple Music Radio listening can go beyond the featured stations to those you create yourself, based on artists and musical groups that you like: for example, if you like Bill Evans, Bruce Springsteen, The Clash, and Alfred Brendel, you can create a station for each.
Apple Music Radio stations don’t play music just by that artist: if you choose an artist for an Apple Music Radio station, you’ll get a couple of songs by that artist and other songs by similar artists. And if you create a genre station, you’ll hear a broad variety of music from that genre.
You can create a custom station for any item in your library, or on Apple Music. Click the More icon next to any item and choose Create Station, and the Music app will begin playing that station’s music. Unfortunately, when you do this, it stops playing the current track and begins playing something else.
You can access your new station later in the Recently Played section of the Radio view and in For You. You cannot delete stations you create in this manner.
Create Your Own Personal Radio Station
In addition to radio stations based on songs, albums, artists, or genres, you can create a personal radio station that will be called “Your Name’s Station.” To do this, tell Siri, on any device, to “Play some music.” A radio station will be created just for you, based on your music library, listening history, and loves and dislikes. You’ll find it, along with other radio stations, in the Recently Played section of the Radio view, as well as in Recently Played in For You, if you have, indeed, played it recently.
Apple initially called this feature “Personal DJ,” but hasn’t really used that term much since then. To be honest, this is one of my favorite features of Apple Music. When I want music, but don’t know what to listen to, I launch this radio station. This is especially practical when I’m driving and don’t want to pick music. It’s easy to skip tracks I don’t want to hear, and I never have to skip more than a couple of times.
In addition, there’s a lot of variety. Right now, as I’m working on this book, I’ve been listening to my personal radio station for about two hours, and there have been no repeats, and only a handful of tracks that I don’t like.
However, it took a while for the Apple Music algorithm to really understand my eclectic tastes. Even then, it seems to omit certain genres. For example, I rarely hear classical music, which is a good thing; that genre is not meant to be listened to with movements out of context.
View Your Radio History
Apple Music Radio is about serendipity. Ideally, you’ll hear songs that you like and haven’t heard for a while (and that aren’t in your Music library), as well as songs and artists that you’ve never heard before.
Apple Music records your listening history so you can check the songs you’ve heard, and potentially buy them or add them to the cloud. To review what you’ve heard on all Apple Music Radio stations, click the Up Next 
icon on the right side of the app header when the Radio view is active (Figure 29).
You can listen to any track again by double-clicking it, and if you hover your pointer over the song and click the More icon, as you can see next to the song at the top of the History list in Figure 29 above, you can view info about the track, view it in the iTunes Store or in Apple Music, share it, or share the radio station on which you heard it. However, you cannot add a track to your music library, so if you want to do that, double-click it to play it, and add it from the More icon on the app header.