10 Features Apple Music Needs to Catch Up to Its Streaming Rivals

Apple is planning a much-needed revamp to Apple Music, and it’s coming none too soon. Here’s how Apple can update its music-streaming service to make it more appealing to music lovers.

While it’s nice to have a couple of Beats radio stations in Apple Music, it needs to be expanded to include other tastes and content. Apple has done a fine job of delivering 24-hour radio, but if it adds more stations and becomes more of a competitor to services like SiriusXM or even traditional radio, people would be more likely to use the service.

Apple simply needs to do better job of understanding what people want to hear. Pandora has done that exceedingly well by tracking what customers are listening to. Apple must enhance its analysis of individual listening behaviors and deliver content people actually want to listen to. If it can’t do that as well as competitors, Apple Music won’t grow at the rate Apple hopes.

My Music, the repository for people to access the content they have in their library, is cumbersome and difficult to use. The feature doesn’t make it easy to quickly find artists or songs, and even searching for content can be difficult. Apple’s My Music, which includes self-made playlists, is arguably one of the biggest issues with Apple Music—and it needs to be fixed.

Connect was supposed to be a place where artists and their fans could, well, connect. But the truth is artists like to connect with their fans on Twitter or Instagram and have no interest in Apple’s platform. Apple needs to forget Connect and focus on the platform’s other features.

In general, Apple Music’s interface is hard to use. The interface feels cluttered, and the user experience is generally not as appealing as competing services. Apple should take a page out of its own book on hardware and make Apple Music’s design simpler and far more user-friendly.

Apple’s For You section is supposed to be the place where Apple delivers content users might want to hear. But it doesn’t always do a good job. The selection of playlists is small, and worse, it sometimes doesn’t make sense. Apple’s For You needs to be smarter and deliver broader content and playlists.

Apple has done a fine job of bringing on major artists, like Taylor Swift, to promote its streaming service, but it needs to get them invested in Apple Music itself. Apple has gotten some exclusives from artists like Drake, but it must go further. If Apple can get exclusive content from the likes of Swift and Adele, as well as make it more financially attractive to get early access to content (similar to the way Kanye West brought his album to Tidal), it’d go a long way in making the service more appealing.

Apple is enabling users to tell the service what they like thanks to an included “heart” button. However, the company doesn’t make it easy for users to say what they don’t like. Similar to Pandora, Apple should have a thumbs-up-thumbs-down system that would allow users to tell Apple’s editors their tastes.

Apple Music lives on iOS devices and computers, but wouldn’t it be nice if it were also available online? Some people like the idea of streaming content in the browser at work or other places, and at least so far, Apple hasn’t offered that. Perhaps the time has come to deliver an online portal where users can easily stream their favorite tracks from the Web.

One of Spotify’s biggest issues with artists right now is that it offers a free, ad-supported version. Apple cannot fall into that trap and try to appease its users with such a move. Artists and record labels don’t like the idea of free access to their tracks, which could hurt Apple’s chances of expanding its music offerings. Apple Music must remain a paid service.