APPLE MUSIC – The Best or Worst Thing to Happen to Music?

OK, so right up front, let me say that the following discussion has absolutely nothing to do with law. But it was very much born from my work as a lawyer. You see, as a trial lawyer, I am on the road a lot, travelling throughout West Virginia and the country at large, constantly gathering evidence to present at trials on behalf of our clients. I average about 2,000 miles a month on my car, in addition to the thousands of miles of air travel I’m also logging each year. With all that travel, especially the driving, it is nice to have something to pass the time, and boy did I find it at the start of 2016 in the form of Apple Music. Apple allows you to try the service for free for the first three months. I signed up in January, so my free trial is coming to an end and I now find myself at a crossroads as to whether to continue to pay for the service. But not for the obvious reason that I will now have to shell out cash every month. Instead, my dilemma stems from the fact that Apple Music is perhaps too good. Allow me to explain. For those unfamiliar with this service, Apple Music is Apple’s answer to Spotify, Pandora and all the other popular music streaming services that have utterly transformed the way music is consumed by the listening public. But before I tell you how great Apple Music is, lest anyone think I’m a paid spokesperson (I wish) you should know that I am no Apple loyalist. I’ve used Apple products off and on, along with others, for a number of years now and find them to be reliable enough and user friendly enough, but I think there are plenty of other products out there that do things just as well, if not better, than Apple’s products. With the exception of Apple Music. Now while I’ve never been particular tech savvy, I have been on the digital delivery bandwagon since its inception, trying Napster, Music Match, Rhapsody, Pandora, Spotify and pretty much every other streaming site du jour that has come out in the last 15 years. Having now used Apple Music for a few months, I can say, unequivocally, that it is far and away the best music service I have ever used. At $10 a month (at the end of your free trial), Apple Music is simply an incredible deal. Apple Music gives you instant, on demand access to seemingly every song ever recorded in the history of music. OK, I’m sure Apple doesn’t have every song, but I have yet to come up empty using this service. New music is instantly available when it hits the street, and I have found the back catalog to be vastly more extensive than any other offering from competitors. In addition to playing whatever music you want, whenever you want, Apple Music also offers a seemingly endless number of curated radio stations. These stations can generally be divided into three categories – genre, artist and news based. For instance, there are stations that play hard rock, old school rap, today’s pop hits, etc. and then there are stations specific to your favorite artists. Love Pearl Jam? Great, there are at least three different “Pearl Jam” radio stations that play music from the group itself, its collaborators over the years and other similar sounding artists. Similar stations exist for practically every popular artist out there. Finally, Apple Music includes ESPN Radio, BBC and other news-based stations. While I listen to those frequently, I particularly like the genre and artist radio stations, because I am always on the lookout for new artists and new music to discover, and the traditional radio outlets simply don’t offer that anymore. Today’s terrestrial radio seems to be singularly focused on either music for teenage girls or playing the same 100 classic rock songs that I could die happy if I never heard again (Smoke on the Water. Again. Really?). So for the past decade, most of my new music/artist discovery has come from listening to the Artist-based radio stations on these streaming services. And therein lies the crux of my indecisiveness over continuing with Apple Music. You see, Apple Music is commercial free and the artist and genre based stations are so deep that you can listen non-stop for hours and hours without any repeats, and you can skip as many songs as you want without restriction. Apple Music’s offering is so vast and its utility so unfettered that I find myself constantly skipping through what are probably great songs if I’m not instantly captivated. My thinking goes something like, “well this song is great/interesting/classic and all, but maybe there’s another song coming up that I’m going to like even more.” For me that’s an unfortunate mindset to have, but the possibility that an even better song looms just a click away often proves awful hard to resist. I have no doubt that the unfettered access Apple Music offers has summarily undermined my patience when it comes to digesting new music, which is probably causing me to miss out on some great stuff that requires multiple listens for me to fully absorb, understand and ultimately dig. In the old days when I was shelling out $15 - $20 for a CD, you better believe I was playing it over and over to get my money’s worth, whether I thought it was good upon first listen or not. And by doing that, there were a countless number of times where an album I thought was mediocre, or not as good as the last offering from a particular artist, upon first listen became one of my favorites after taking the time to get familiar with it. I experienced this same phenomenon through the free version of sites like Pandora, which limits the number of skips you can make in a day, which forced me to be very selective and listen to songs or artists that I might think are just OK at first, but eventually come to really enjoy by being motivated to listen all the way through. But with Apple Music, I find myself constantly looking for the next great song, and skipping songs if they don’t instantly grab me within the first few notes. And despite my complete awareness of what I’m doing, I do it anyway. While I realize this dilemma is solidly in the “first world problem” category, I don’t believe I’m alone in this habitual skipping practice and I find myself concerned, and feeling guilty, that by constantly looking for the next great thing, I’m contributing to a larger phenomenon within the music industry that I believe undermines music as a career in today’s world. The business model of modern music has evolved towards a singles driven market and the support and cultivation of artists by record labels, to enable artists to realize their full potential, has largely vanished. Recording artists are seemingly becoming increasingly disposable and largely abandoned once the label has milked a hit or two for all its worth and the artist fails or refuses to create more of the same. If this were the model in the 1970’s, we’d never know artists like Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty or any other artists that had to get a couple albums under their belts to really hit their stride. The easy compromise, of course, is to just stop skipping songs, but with the depth and freedom Apple Music provides, that is proving to be much easier said than done for me. It’s hard enough to make a profession out of being a musician and, in as far as the law of unintended consequences goes, I find myself wondering whether Apple Music might just be too much of a good thing.