Not a day goes by since I wrote that post (I have the tracking stats to prove it) that at least a few people don’t find my article via a Google search, which means people have been frustrated with this issue and have been looking for solutions for a very long time. Some have even reached out to me to thank me for reassuring them they aren’t crazy.

Imagine how my ears pricked up, then, when rumors started floating around this year that Apple was poised to retire iTunes in the next major version of macOS? While many were frightened Apple was taking away their precious music player of choice, I was elated at the chance of a brand new app which would presumably not elicit this same bug. After all, the rumor originally figured the new Music app would be ported over from its iOS counterpart on the iPad. And the iPad version doesn’t have this bug.

But then Apple announced Music for macOS (which will ship this fall with the Catalina update), and it quickly became apparent that rather than a complete rewrite, the app would simply be iTunes with a new name and a lot of its more bloated features removed.

Happy as I am to see the bloat removed, and as much as I believe strongly that you should not throw away perfectly functioning code for no good reason, the code in iTunes was far from perfectly functioning.

So, the big question: Would this bug still be present in Music, despite all the work Apple had put into rebranding and reworking it?

Luckily, I don’t have to wait until September to find out. I’m an Apple developer, after all, so I get early access to the beta versions of this software.

So I installed Catalina’s beta onto my Mac, fired up Music, turned on the iCloud Music Library feature, and…

Well, at first, the duplicates appeared again. I was despondent. I could not believe Apple didn’t bother addressing this issue after at least one-and-a-half years. (In all likelihood, the bug has been around quite a bit longer than that.)

But then, a few moments later, something wonderful happened. All the duplicate tracks disappeared in an instant. It was if Music caught itself making the same old mistake, and then corrected itself.

As of this writing, the duplicate tracks are still gone. iCloud Music Library is functioning on my Mac as intended. And any new tracks I download are being synced perfectly between my iPhone and Mac.

Fingers crossed that all is well, and we will finally be able to call this bug defeated.

I say will be, of course, because Catalina is not shipping yet. Those of you who are not developers will have to wait to get this fix. And there’s always the chance that the bug will return before shipping. But I highly doubt it. I think there are going to be a lot of happy Music users come fall.

Fall is here, and that means it’s time for yet another chapter in Joe’s Adventures of Getting His iTunes Music Collection onto His New iPhone.

Don’t worry: This one has a mostly happy ending.

Long-time readers will recall past issues with getting my music situation settled on the iPhone every year. Here’s the short version:

• I want ALL my music on my phone, downloaded, and ready to play. I am away from internet connectivity often enough (on the subway, on airplanes, and so on) that having local music at the ready is essential. I do not like choosing the music I might want to listen to two days before I go on a trip. Call me crazy, but I expect my music experience in 2018 to be as good as what I had with my iPod back in 2002.
• I have tons of music in my iTunes library. Hundreds of gigabytes worth. Tens of thousands of songs.
• Much of the music in my library is from iTunes. Much of it is not. I’ve ripped old CDs, downloaded tracks from indie bands, bought tracks from other online services, etc.
• A good number of my tracks are not available on iTunes. Either they never made it there, or they have since been taken down. Most of these tracks are obscure stuff from unsigned bands or alternative releases that are only available in physical form, etc.
• In a new twist for this year, I’m now an Apple Music subscriber. I use the service mainly for discovery, and so I can ask HomePod to play things for me very easily. But I still want to keep my precious collection of owned music safe and secure, in case I ever stop being an Apple Music subscriber.

If any of the above sounds familiar, congrats. You are as odd as I am when it comes to music. I get that most people don’t care about locally stored songs, and they listen to the same five tracks over and over again for several months at a time. Congratulations to them. Apple has you well covered. For the rest of us, getting our peculiar musical needs met takes a bit more effort.

This year, because I’ve added Apple Music into the mix, and along with it iCloud Music Library, I had to change up my methodology a bit.

I won’t go into why here, but you can read all about why I use iCloud Music Library on my phone and iPad, but not my Mac. Unsurprisingly, that bug has still not been addressed.^[1]

So here’s what I did. I’m happy to report this worked out very well.

Step One - Get a new phone, but leave music alone

I tend to order my new iPhone for pickup at the retail store. I like to get up in the morning early, head down to the Upper West Side, pick up my phone, and get home by 9am or so.^[2]

When I got my new phone this year, I restored over the wire from a backup I made on iTunes that morning. This is preferable to an iCloud backup in a few fundamental ways. First, it’s encrypted, which means all my passwords to my apps come along for the ride. I don’t have to spend the majority of my day launching apps and logging back in. I may have to reauthorize FaceID a few times, but overall it’s far smoother. Second, it’s much faster than an iCloud backup.

iCloud backup is great for daily backups and emergencies. For a new phone, I highly recommend running an iTunes wired backup of your old phone just before purchasing.

Once my backup was restored, I waited for my apps to download, then went about my day. I made no attempt to get music onto my phone, unless it was to download an album or two to listen to while working. The real process was going to have to wait until bedtime.

Step Two - Get any music that was inadvertently downloaded off the phone

Just before bed that first night with my new phone, I went into Settings > Music > Downloaded Music and erased any songs I had downloaded throughout the day. This is to prevent accidental duplicates. Then I went to Settings > Music and turned off iCloud Music Library. This is necessary for allowing my Mac to transfer files to my phone manually. (Remember, I keep iCloud Music Library off for my Macs, for reasons stated here.) I also double checked to be sure Optimize Storage is turned off.^[3]

Step Three - Plug into iTunes and get ready to drag some music

Next, I plugged my new phone into my MacBook Pro and fired up iTunes. I made sure I had music selected from the category selector. Once the phone was recognized, I could see it in my Devices list on the left. I selected artists from the Library list (you could just as easily select songs if you like), selected ALL of the tracks by first selecting a track, then typing Command + A to Select All, then dragged all of those files over to On My Phone.^[4]

After a few seconds of waiting, the head’s up display on iTunes confirmed that the files were indeed beginning to copy.

Step Four - Go to bed

Seriously. In the case of my library, this was going to take a few hours. There’s a reason I do this at the end of the day.

Step Five - Confirm everything has copied

The next morning, I awoke to find that all of my files had copied over just fine. No error messages on my Mac, and a quick trip to the Music app on my phone showed tons of tracks in the Downloaded Music list. Long-time readers will understand why this made me so happy. If you’ve been dragging and dropping from iTunes to phones over the years, you’ll know that this hasn’t always been a guaranteed outcome. I am glad to see that this is still working perfectly in the latest iTunes and iOS versions.^[5]

Step Six - Re-enable iCloud Music Library and do some downloading

Now that my entire library from my Mac was on my phone, I wanted to get iCloud Music library up and running again. That’s as easy as going back to Settings > Music and flipping that switch back on. The phone will ask you if you want to keep the music you’ve already got on your phone. Make sure you do that, or else you’ll end up with no locally downloaded music again. I worried for a moment that I may end up with duplicates in my iCloud Music Library as a result of this, but so far that does not seem to have happened.

Finally, I went to the Music app on my phone, scrolled through the recently added section, and downloaded those few albums I had downloaded recently on my old phone for discovery. Those tracks aren’t on my Mac (thanks to the fact that I can’t run iCloud Music Library on my Mac), so I needed to bring them back down onto the phone manually. Not a huge deal, compared to downloading everything that is on my Mac manually.

Conclusion

Compared to previous years, where I’ve spent several days or even weeks trying to get my entire library to my phone, this worked out great in one night. It would be a bit easier, of course, if Apple fixed the iCloud Music Library duplicate issue on the Mac. But for now I’ll take it.

I’m sure I’ll discover an album or two I had downloaded to my old phone that I’ve forgotten to re-download on the new phone. I figure that will be a minor annoyance compared to years past.

Hopefully, if you’ve got a bug up your ass about music like I do, this method will help save you some agony.

Update: It looks like Apple may finally have fixed this bug in the next version of macOS, called Catalina. Read more details in my new post here.

Over the years, the majority of my complaints about Apple have centered around music. That’s because I love music, and Apple clearly doesn’t always think enough about people outside of its contrived all-in-on-Apple-Music listener when it comes to the iTunes experience.

Today’s complaint actually begins with a recent positive discovery. I finally gave in to the temptation and signed up for a free trial of Apple Music, and it’s really great. The recommendations it makes are often good, or at least not terrible, and I love being able to try out lots of artists that I otherwise would probably not have discovered. I love downloading tracks on my phone as I discover them, and I like listening to them even when I’m offline. So far, so good. I definitely plan to remain a subscriber.

But then I ran into a bit of a snag when it came to the iCloud Music Library. This is the feature that syncs whatever you put on one device with all your iPhones, iPads, Macs, etc. In theory, it’s a great idea. If I discover a track on my iPhone and download it, it’ll be sitting on my Mac next time I might want to listen. And vice versa. On my iPad, I don’t auto-download these tracks, but they show up in my library for streaming if I want them. Perfect.^[1]

But after a couple of days of enjoying this new iCloud Library experience, I noticed a problem on my Mac. In iTunes, every track that is available on Apple Music but that I had acquired elsewhere (CD Rip, purchased from another store, etc) was doubled in my iTunes library. Each song would be listed twice, in other words.

In some cases, one version would have a little cloud icon with the down arrow, indicating that it can be downloaded from iTunes, and the other would have a cloud and an X, indicating a track that is from my library, already downloaded, but not from iTunes. On my phone and iPad, these tracks only show up once. But on the Mac, there were two. Right after one another.

In other cases, it would actually download the second copy, so I’d get one track with no icon (downloaded from iTunes) and the other with the X (my original file). All of these files were taking up twice as much space on my hard drive.^[2]

File size issues aside, you can see how this would be a problem for someone like me who likes listening to albums. Unless I want to hear each song twice in a row before advancing to the next one, I have to remove all the duplicate tracks from Up Next every time I click on an album. (Even the ones that aren’t yet downloaded just stream when I play the album.)

Well, that’s a strange bug, I thought. Maybe I should throw away the extra downloaded ones and just leave my original tracks. We’re talking about thousands of tracks, so that would be a lot of work. But if it’s just a one-time glitch, so be it.

When I attempted to remove a cloud track however, I got a warning that it would remove the track on my phone as well. That’s not good. I want the track to stay on my iPhone. I just don’t want two copies on my Mac.

The other option, of course, was to erase my copies of the tracks and just leave the cloud versions. Which means if I ever cancel Apple Music, those tracks will likely be gone forever, since I didn’t buy them on iTunes. They would not be part of my purchase history, so they would disappear, along with everything else I try in Apple Music.

This is not an option.

So I found a third alternative: I just turned off iCloud Music Library on my Mac. The duplicates immediately went away, and I was left with my old library intact. I miss out on syncing new tracks that I find on my phone, but those can be found and streamed on my Mac from the recents section of For You. Terrible user experience, but at least there’s a workaround.

Believe it or not, I wasn’t driven to write a long tirade yet. I tweeted something snarky, but then I let it go. Lots of others informed me this has been a known issue for quite a while. Yikes.

And then something happened this week, when one of my favorite bands, Big Big Train, released a pair of new Christmas songs. Only one is available on iTunes, while the other is a special b-side you can only get from their web store. A portion of the proceeds from those songs also gets donated to charity when you buy on their store. So I bought both tracks on their store, of course.

I often buy tracks from indie artists on their own sites, anyway. As an extra sign of support. This is not weird or extremely unusual behavior. It’s pretty common for music fans.

It’s when I tried to listen to these tracks that I found my inspiration for this rant. I could add these two new tracks to my Mac, no problem. But because I didn’t have iCloud Music Library turned on, those tracks were not synced up with my phone. Okay. I can just plug my iPhone into the Mac with a USB cable and drag the new tracks over to my phone, right?

Nope.

Because iCloud Music Library was turned on for the iPhone, I was now no longer able to simply drag and drop files between the Mac and iPhone. iCloud Music Library is an all-or-nothing proposition. The only way to get these two tracks onto my phone would be to either turn off iCloud Music Library on the phone (and thus lose all the Apple Music tracks I’ve downloaded) or turn iCloud Music Library back on for my Mac, and let the tracks sync.

I chose the latter, which, of course, brought back all the duplicate tracks on my Mac as well. So then I had to turn off iCloud Music Library on my Mac after the upload of my new songs made it to my other devices. Fortunately, the two new tracks remained on my phone.

You read that right. Moving forward, whenever I get a new audio track that isn’t from Apple Music, I’ll have to add the track to iTunes, turn on iCloud Music Library on the Mac, let it upload that new track to the cloud and download all these thousands of duplicates, then turn off iCloud Music Library on the Mac to remove all the duplicates.

Lovely.

I purchase the vast majority of my music from the iTunes Music Store. I shouldn’t be punished for occasionally getting tracks from other sources. Especially when those tracks aren’t even available on iTunes.

All of this suggested to me that perhaps no one at Apple has any music that wasn’t downloaded from iTunes? Although that can’t be true. You’d think someone in charge of music over at Apple had listened to music prior to the iTunes Store’s existence, which means they at least have some tracks that were ripped from CDs in the early 2000s. Given this issue is so thoroughly annoying, I would think it would have gotten fixed somewhere in the last year or two once someone noticed, right? It’s simply not possible that no one over there has noticed this problem.

The only other two conclusions I can make is that no one at Apple cares (not likely) or that this duplication of tracks is somehow intended. Which brings me to my favorite question: Why? Why would anyone want to search through their entire library and delete all these duplicate tracks? Or erase their entire music library before signing up for Apple Music, so their library would be fresh and only sourced from Apple?

If the Mac can detect that I have a track in my library that’s from another source but also available on iTunes, why can’t it just mark that track as already downloaded, and then just download a copy to my other devices? Like I said, this works just fine on my iOS devices.^[3]

Despite my frequent complaining, iTunes has improved over the years. So many things that used to drive me nuts are better at this point. I’m back to using the built-in iOS Music app again. I recently wrote about drag and drop from iTunes to your iOS devices finally working reliably. I can finally sort albums on my phone by date instead of title. I signed up for Apple Music and I actually like it. Apple is working on making these experiences better. Maybe this duplicates issue is just another item on a long list of things to be fixed, and we’ll eventually see it go away. I have to hope so. It’s one of the few remaining big ticket items that leaves me scratching my head at an otherwise decent music experience.

Progress has been very slow going, though. I’ve already volunteered, if Apple ever wants to take me up on it, to help them find any remaining issues by examining my music library. If they want to find music-lover use cases they probably haven’t considered, my hard drive is full of them. Heck, I’m usually in the Bay Area at least twice a year, anyway. I’d be happy to stop by whenever they want to talk.

Last time I left off at the artist listing screen. Today, I want to dig into the individual artist view, album view, and the now playing screen.

One of the reasons I chose to give Music another try in iOS 10 is that Apple has finally given us a proper artist album listing, with albums that drill down into their own screens. This means we can finally choose an artist, then play a single album without it continuing on to the next album. Sounds like a small thing, but I dropped Music altogether years ago for that one reason alone.

Best iPod we’ve ever made, my ass.

Unfortunately, unlike iTunes on the Mac and Windows, Music on iOS still only sorts albums by name, giving us no option to sort them by date instead.

This is one of those head slap moments that makes you wonder if anyone at Apple has ever been a serious music collector. As far as I’m concerned, Apple cannot claim that it loves music ever again until it gives us the option to sort albums by date. No self-respecting music geek sorts albums by name. I don’t care if you hide the option in the Settings app, just give me the option for date, you wankers.[1]

Sorting issues aside, I like most everything else about the Artist page in Music. Album art is square and large, as it should be. There’s a quick option to shuffle all albums, in case that’s your thing. And, as I said before, choosing an album gives you a separate view with just that album’s tracks.

At the bottom of the artist page there’s also a new link “See more by…” that takes you to that artist’s other music on Apple Music. I’m not an Apple Music subscriber, but I guess it’s okay to be able to see what tracks are available without having to bounce into the iTunes app.[2] Unfortunately, any links inside here only give you the option of subscribing to Apple Music. You can’t link over to iTunes to buy any tracks you find. You can’t even preview tracks to see if they’re worth subscribing to get. It’s subscribe, or go screw yourself.

I’m sure the artists love that.

What’s so hard about offering a link, even via 3D Touch, that takes you to the iTunes store to buy a track?

Buy a track? Come on, Joe. Who buys tracks nowadays?

Oh yeah, that’s right. People who LOVE MUSIC.

Once you choose an album, you get the track listing, as you’d expect. Shuffle is right up there at the top again. Okay. Not something I ever use, but I guess a lot of people like shuffle. (More on this in a moment.)

Choose a track, and it starts playing immediately. At the bottom of the screen, just above the tab bar, you get a new bar for now playing, which stays there no matter where you go in the app. I like this a lot. I always hated how hard it was to get to the now playing screen on my old iPod and on Apple TV. This makes it one tap away at all times, which is brilliant. Music also doesn’t assume that once I’ve chosen a track I want the entire screen to be filled with now playing. This is also a good design choice. Once my music is running, I may want to select something else to play next, or keep reading the rest of the track listing, or just go exploring more through my catalog, etc.

At the bottom of the album page, there’s “More by…” again, only this time with albums and images listed. There’s also a “You Might Also Like” section with music from similar artists. Okay, now I’m getting annoyed, Apple. I switched Apple Music off in Settings. I’m clearly not interested in joining Apple Music. Fuck off , already.

Again, every link in these two bottom sections I didn’t ask for give me no option to even preview tracks from these suggested artists. Just subscribe now.

No thanks.[3]

The now playing toolbar has convenient buttons for pausing and skipping the current track. Another great design decision. One-tap access to pausing is essential, and sometimes you really do need to skip that one track you hate immediately.

Tap into the full-screen now playing view, and you are treated with nice big album art and some more controls in an overlay “card” type view that is reminiscent of Palm’s WebOS. I mostly like what they’ve done with this screen. But there are a few odd choices here.

The big one that others have mentioned before: Where are the shuffle and repeat buttons? For all the emphasis on shuffle being at the top of the past few screens in a row, I get to now playing, and shuffle has disappeared. Turns out, the now playing view is scrollable, and shuffle and repeat are just below the “fold.” Why? No reason I can discern. There’s plenty of room under the volume slider for more than two buttons.

Also, if you’re going to make this screen a scroll view, some indication that it can be scrolled might be a good idea. I know several people who had no idea that they can scroll this view at all. And that’s a shame, because what’s down below the fold is actually quite nice: an Up Next listing, where you can manually reorder or remove tracks from the upcoming cue.

Up Next is a pretty powerful thing. Setting up a quick one-off track listing for a party, for instance, becomes quite easy. I never use playlists, but I often will select a number of albums to listen to in a row when I’m in a certain mood, or I have people over the house, or when I’m on a road trip, etc. The “Play Next” and “Play Later” options on albums and tracks make setting up a quick cue super flexible and easy.

Overall, I actually like Music in iOS 10. The app is far from perfect, and I really want the heavy-handed Apple Music sales pitch to go away, but otherwise, for my listening style, this app is greatly improved over iOS 9 and earlier versions of Music.

And, lo and behold, since I’ve started adding tracks back to my iPhone, I have yet to experience the old issues I was having with files disappearing, doubling of tracks, tracks that simply won’t play, etc. Maybe the file system bugs I was experiencing are gone? I may just upgrade to a 128GB or even 256GB iPhone in a few weeks. I’d love to retire my old iPod again for good.

I’ve been recording music on my Mac for the better part of 20 years. Once I learned that I could combine my love of music with computers, it became my favorite way to spend my free time.

Sometimes I would record individual songs. Entire collections of songs. Half-baked songs that never went anywhere. It didn’t matter. It was always a fun outlet for my creativity.

Whenever I create marketing videos for various Bombing Brain projects or my own apps, my favorite part has always been making the background music. I spend far more time than is probably reasonable crafting short pieces of music to play under videos. Luckily, my cohorts at Bombing Brain have always indulged me, allowing me to experiment with many styles of music, rather than forcing me to stick to the corporate hipster jingles found in most modern product videos.

The other Bombing Brain guys are also accomplished musicians. Bombing Brain has provided rich soundtracks for a few games over the years. And we like to jam for a bit whenever we get together.

So it only made sense to us at Bombing Brain that we take this love of creating music and turn it into a service for others. After all, if we needed background music several times a year, certainly our Teleprompt+ and Setlists customers do, too. Not everyone has in-house talent, and not everyone can afford to hire a musician to produce bespoke background music on demand.

There are other royalty-free music services out there, but none with licensing terms as generous as ours at backdrop.audio. With a one-time low price, you no longer have an excuse not to add some music to your apps, your marketing videos, your YouTube tutorials, your podcasts, or whatever multimedia projects you create. We don’t charge you yearly to renew your license, and we don’t care how big your audience is. Pay once and use the track forever.

We’re starting with a very small catalog, as it takes a lot of time to produce each track. But we will be adding much more over time, in all sorts of styles. And that’s where we can use some help. If you have suggestions for genres you’d like to hear more of on our site, you can contact us to make requests. We plan to create new tracks based on the styles most requested by our customers.

If you have the budget, you can also hire us to make a unique track just for your project. We’re happy to quote you a price.

Our hope is that we make it just a little easier for small indies to get quality background music into their projects. If you occasionally have a need to drop some music into the things you create, check out the catalog backdrop.audio. And let us know what you think.

I’ve heard mixed reviews on the new iOS 10 beta’s music app. Long-time readers will no doubt remember that I gave up playing music on my iPhone altogether a while back, due to the Music app being completely incongruous with the way I listen to music, not to mention constant issues with songs not downloading, going missing, etc. So I’ve been happily using my old iPod Classic for a while now.

And that’s going great, actually. The old iPod is still working. But I’m a tech geek, and I don’t believe in hanging onto the past forever, so with every new iteration of iOS, I am bound to look at what Apple does with Music to see if there’s a chance they may have actually fixed the issues that drove me away.

Right off the bat, looking at Music.app in the iOS 10 beta, I see two things that have me rather hopeful. First, there’s the Downloaded Music section, which shows you only the songs you actually have living on your iPhone, rather than showing your cloud songs mixed in with your downloaded songs. In previous iterations of Music, there was a switch in Settings to show or hide cloud music, but this dedicated space within the app is actually way better. It gives me the option of looking for a cloud album to download when the mood strikes and I happen to be connected without having to drop out of the app and dig through Settings to flip the cloud music switch.

Second and much more important, when you sort by Artist, you now finally once again have a separate screen between the albums and the individual songs. Which means it’s now possible again to play a single album from an artist when sorting by artist. Hooray. Functionality that existed in iPhone OS 1.0 is now back—many, many years later. This alone was the reason I originally ditched the built-in Music app for Ecoute before giving up on Music on my iPhone altogether.

So, what does this mean for me? Well, I’m doing a little experiment. I’ve moved Music.app back to my main home screen, and I’ve downloaded some music to my phone again, via iTunes. Not my whole library, as I only have a 64GB iPhone at the moment, and my whole library wouldn’t fit on a 128GB, anyway. But come fall, when iOS 10 is released, and with it hopefully a 256GB option for the next iPhone, I may finally be able to replace my old iPod Classic for good, if all the file disappearing and syncing issues have been resolved in iOS. I may finally have all my songs in my pocket again, without carrying around a separate, aging device with a hard drive and battery that are due to fail any minute now.

But that point about the file issues is a huge if. Thus, the experiment. So far, I’ve only added about 15GB of songs onto the iPhone, to see if they actually stick. I’ll keep adding more and more as I go and keep a close eye on whether or not the songs are actually there. Will songs simply disappear again? Will duplicates show up for no reason? Will album tracks show up out of order? Will tracks appear to be there, but when I hit play simply skip to the next track? If history is any indication, all of the above are not only possible, but likely. But I have my fingers crossed. After all, I’m an optimist at heart.

The Music app is far from perfect in iOS 10, but just those two simple changes are enough to get me to at least try it again. I’ll write up some of my gripes about what’s still broken in the near future.

Airplane Mode’s first music video goes live today. I can’t even express how much fun this was to make. Nor can I express my gratitude for everyone involved in the process.

I’ll have more to say on the Airplane Mode blog later. Dave has written a wonderful piece about putting the video together from his perspective.

In the meantime, enjoy the video. And if you’re in NYC tonight, come to Subject LES for our release party at 7pm.

And don’t miss our podcast episode about this song. Lots of background info, for those of you who like the inside scoop.

I’ve been a musician since before I owned my first computer. Music will always be my first love. To feed my creativity in this way is beyond exciting. I hope you enjoy:

Airplane Mode Episode 1: Let’s Start a Band

There is much, much more to come. We’ve got the songs written and are in the process of recording all of them to the best of our abilities. Along the way, we’ll be documenting our process, our thinking, and everything in between. We’re just getting started.

A very special thanks to Hover for being our first patron in this adventure. They have always been a great supporter of the tech community; to see them supporting independent music makes me respect them that much more. Don’t forget to use “tidalwave” when you sign up to save 10% on your purchase.

And you too can join Hover in patronizing the arts. Sign up for our Patreon here.

Read more from Dave on why we’re doing the podcast here.

Spin is an original indie band, formed from the remnants of a cover band that I founded in college with my brother Matt decades ago. Neither Matt nor I are in what became Spin, but I like to think I had a little to do with the guys getting together. My other brother Hank is on lead guitar, and my high school friends Jim and Eric are on keyboards/vocals, and guitar/vocals respectively.

I take no responsibility for Lou, their drummer.[1]

I bring up Spin here on my blog, not only because they’re a cool group that you should check out. They have songs and albums out there you can purchase, and you can also find their music on streaming services such as Spotify, Rdio, etc. They’ve been gaining traction lately and have even sold some of their music for use in various video games and TV show soundtracks (more on that later).

If you’re a Stalker fan, you’ve probably recently heard their rather dark cover of Happy Together

The reason I bring them up is to demonstrate my thinking about the Apple Music free trial. How better to assess the effects this trial will have on indie musicians than to ask an actual group of indie musicians?

When the whole Taylor Swift love letter to Apple thing happened, I decided to ask my brother Hank what he thought about streaming services like Spotify and the new Apple music.

The brief resulting conversation didn’t surprise me, but you might find it illuminating.

Spin made a total of roughly $100 last year from streaming services, give or take. You read that right. $100. For the whole band. For their entire catalog. For the entire year.

Now, Dave Wiskus kindly did the math on what Taylor Swift was bound to lose from the three-month free trial of Apple Music, and he concluded that it would take eleven-and-a-half years for her to make up the revenue she’d likely lose in that three months.

Spin, on the other hand, can skip getting a beer after their next gig and be pretty much caught up on the $25 they’d lose in three months on Apple’s service.

I don’t question Taylor Swift’s motives in removing her latest album from Apple Music. It’s her music, and she’s in a position of power to make that strategic choice. But her claim that “This is about the young songwriter who just got his or her first cut and thought that the royalties from that would get them out of debt” strikes me as a bit hyperbolic, given what actual young songwriters actually get paid from any streaming service. Indies know that streaming is a bum deal, financially. Only a fool would expect Apple Music to be your ticket out of debt. And she knows that.

The guys from Spin don’t put music on streaming services hoping to make money. Selling your music to the general public is a losing proposition in 2015. Instead, they put their music out there so it can get discovered, to raise awareness, to gain future fans who might spend a little money down the road. Any service you’re not on is lost potential for finding new true fans.

Does that suck? You bet it does. Is that Apple’s fault? The music labels? Yeah, a bit.

But it’s also our fault. We like to talk about how all artists should be compensated for their art, but then we join Spotify and Apple music, rubbing our hands at the prospect of all the music we can eat for free (if we’re willing to listen to ads) or for $5 or $10 a month.

Taylor Swift, knowing full well how bad an idea it is to chastise the masses for not paying for music (see Lars Ulrich) turns her guns instead at the streaming companies, which now include Apple. Smart business move, absolutely. Lots of hearts and minds won. But is it a way to effect meaningful change in how artists get compensated? I doubt it.

Here’s the thing: It’s not like Eddy Cue is going to buy another Ferrari with all that money he’s not paying artists. There just isn’t that much money to go around in the first place with a streaming service. And it’s a long way around. Because remember, the folks at Spotify and Rdio and Apple need to get paid. The engineers, the accountants, the lawyers, the HR people, and on and on. They all need to divvy up your pittance, and rightfully so. And that’s before your own label employees, promoters, lawyers, etc. We can’t expect people to work for free, can we?

By the time it gets to the band, well, you know… There’s simply nothing left.

So if you oppose the three-month free trial from Apple, which is a step up from Spotify and Rdio, where you can listen for free indefinitely, then take a moment and ask yourself whether you should be opposed to streaming music services altogether. Because the economics of streaming are such that there is no way to make a successful service that actually pays artists.

Or else be in favor of streaming services as a promotional tool, and do your part to help out the bands by buying an actual album or two every month, in addition to the measly $10 you’re paying for the privilege of listening to whatever you damn well please 24 hours a day.

Everyone seems to want Apple to shell out the money to the bands for those three months. How about we do that? I’ve got $25 to give to Spin.

As I was about to post this article, Eddy Cue announced on Twitter that Apple will, in fact, pay artists for the free trial months. Sad to think that this red herring will be enough to placate all the complainers. It’s still a terrible deal for indie musicians.

But no doubt, everyone will shut up now, once they’ve congratulated Taylor Swift on winning a victory for the little people.

It’s all good as long as someone else pays, right?

But the indie bands are still in the same boat, getting paid squat and looking for alternative revenue streams. Like they always have.

I told my brother Hank that Taylor Swift is his new patron saint of indie musicians. He was amused. Not in a disrespectful way, but more in a “we’re all missing the point” sort of way.

If you want to help indie musicians, buy their albums. Go to their shows. Get the T-Shirt. Upvote them in every promotional nonsense contest they get dragged into. Be a fan. And tell your friends. Help indies get noticed by someone who has real money and a need for a good tune to place somewhere.

And then they might just sell another one of their tunes to run during the end credits of the next Avengers movie. Or maybe they’ll pen a song for Taylor Swift. There’s actually still good money in that sort of thing.

1. They have no bass player. Just couldn’t find anyone worthy when I left, I guess.  ↩

Phil Simon: Dream Theater’s Jordan Rudess Talks Music Apps: “There are so many people out there with Android, and I know that it’s a really good system. Personally, I’ve had some problems with it — and that’s why I took so long to get into it and am not anxious to keep working on that platform. First, there’s been an inherent issue with the audio on Android, which has been frustrating to a lot of developers. When you touch the screen to play a sound, there’s a delay, which destroys the reality of the musical experience. It’s a latency issue. Obviously the people in charge of Android’s release overlooked this. It’s a problem that’s definitely preventing some of the music developers I know from wanting to create apps for the platform.

The other problem with Android is, as far as I’m concerned, that the systems aren’t set up to allow for a solid business. Android piracy is rampant. For example, we put out a really cool Android version of MorphWiz Play (even better and easier to use than the one on iOS). But, according to the numbers coming back to our company, it’s being ripped off right and left. Android employees need to create a system that’s fairer to developers.”

(Via huffingtonpost.)

But Android is winning, right?

People think the details don’t matter. But they do. It’s not just about iPhone vs. Galaxy whatever. People say “who cares?” when I talk about how much smoother and responsive scrolling is on the iPhone. Well, here’s a perfect example of why cutting down on latency is extremely important.

And don’t get me started on the App Store vs. the Android Marketplace. It wasn’t easy to make the App Store a place where both customers and developers could make out well. But that good balance makes all the difference, and it’s obvious when you try and find a good app on the Android Marketplace.

I love all of Jordan’s apps. Love that musicians are finding more and more innovative ways to create music with technology. And I’m happy that he can make some extra bucks on the side from building quality apps. His experience with Android is the reason most of us never bother trying to write an app for Android and probably never will.

So Apple threw its hat into the social networking ring yesterday. I signed up, of course, just to see what it was all about.

The jury is still out on this one for me, but there were a few things I immediately liked:

No browser. I almost never log in to my Facebook account from my computer. Unless someone asks me a direct question, or I want to check out a photo that someone tagged of me. I never go to the Twitter web site, either. I do, however, use Twitter all day long on my phone, my iPad, and in Tweetie for Mac. To me, browsers are for browsing. Literally everything else is better suited to a real app. So the fact that Ping happens in iTunes on the Mac and on my phone is perfect for me.

Sign up was super simple. Apple already has my info, thanks to my iTunes account. So there was literally nothing to do to get signed up, except to agree to sign up.

Privacy. Couldn’t be easier. Either I let anyone follow me, I approve all followers, or I don’t let anyone follow me. That’s it. Three choices. Pick one.

Look and feel. It’s not an ugly web site. It’s iTunes, which is familiar. (iTunes may not be Apple’s prettiest user interface, but it’s Helen of Troy compared to Twitter and Facebook.) The look borrows just enough from the iTunes music store to be easy and familiar. It’s also fairly snappy. Navigating around is about a thousand times easier than a Facebook page.It’s limited to music only. I actually think this is an advantage. There are certainly things missing in Ping, but I appreciate that Apple isn’t trying to do everything at once here. This is a place to discuss old and discover new music, and nothing more. That’s refreshing, in the way that Twitter is all about the 140 characters and nothing more. Facebook has turned into a convoluted mess.

I found a few friends and a few artists I liked somewhat easily. Most of my favorite artists weren’t signed up yet, of course. I assume that will change in time. But that did lead me to the bigger question:

Is Apple the right company to be doing a social network? Apple likes control, and it likes to guard secrets about new products. Those are two things that don’t mix with a social network.One of my friends on Twitter quipped that Apple must think we all like Lady Gaga, because it was suggesting that we follow her. The system should be able to analyze our libraries and pick artists we’re more likely to want to follow, in other words. But that wasn’t the reason why Ping suggested Lady Gaga. It suggested Lady Gaga because she was one of only a handful of artists it could suggest. Apple wanted to keep the details of Ping a secret before yesterday, so they only told a few choice artists about it, just to have some content out of the gate. The price for that secrecy was a bunch of people signing up on day one with few people to follow.

That need for secrecy led to a sour experience for some people, right out of the gate.

As I watched Steve unveil Ping I immediately thought that it would be a good service for artists. What a great way for them to get the word out about their music. Be active on Ping, develop a reputation, have a lot of people like your work, and that will most definitely lead to more sales. You’d have to be a bonehead not to sign up and spend a little time on Ping if your music is sold on iTunes.

I also saw how Ping would obviously lead to more revenue for Apple, as the iTunes store was likely to benefit from all those extra links. In the end, this is all about money, and that’s fine. As long as the benefits to the rest of us are great enough.But I’m not completely convinced of Ping’s benefits to the rest of us. Sure, I can follow my friends, see what they’re listening to, and find a lot of new music. But that assumes I like the same music a lot of my friends do. And that’s not a safe assumption.

I have a few friends with similar tastes, but most of my friends listen to crap, to be honest. And they probably think what I listen to is crap. So where does that leave us?

I could limit my “circle of friends” on Ping to just those who share my musical tastes. But how are my other friends going to feel about that? Chances are, as with Facebook, I’m going to follow them out of guilt and just let them spew nonsense all over my recent activity. Which means Ping will end up being yet another service where I have to wade through a sea of uninteresting garbage to get to the one or two good recommendations I want.Ideally, Ping would analyze my iTunes library, find others with similar tastes, and recommend just those people for me to follow. I don’t want to follow my friends; I want to follow other fans of what I like.

I also don’t like that I can’t really just start a conversation about something at random on Ping. I can “like” an album or song and then comment on that, or I can find an album or track and “Post” on it, in which case I suppose I can ask a question like: “Does anyone have this new Pat Metheny recording? What do you think of it?” But everything revolves around those iTunes store links. I can’t ask what people think about Pat Metheny in general, ask when his new tour will kick off, etc., without tying it to an iTunes link. It’s inconvenient, and a bit pushy, if you ask me.

So I’ll keep my eye on Ping. And I’ll of course check it out when I’m looking for some new music. And I’ll try to follow my favorite artists, so that I know when their new stuff is coming out. But Apple has to add more to this musical conversation before I’ll be convinced whether or not it’s going to take flight.

We’ve seen a lot of social networks fail in the last few years. Maybe the world really doesn’t need more than Facebook and Twitter. Maybe that’s all the distraction we can handle.

I think Apple is right to try and make something work here, considering the captive audience of iTunes users it has at its disposal. They have to protect their dominance of the online music world, after all. But I fear that they are getting into this more out of a sense that they HAVE to, rather than because they want to. They can make this happen, but it’s going to take some more thought.