by Jason Snell
In Praise of the A-List
I want to do a loud “me too” to this piece by Jim Dalrymple at The Loop:
The “A-List: Hard Rock” is a playlist, not a station, and it’s focused only on new music. After looking at the list of songs, I found that many of the new songs I found on the Hard Rock station were listed here-and I found a few others too.
The A-List playlists, curated by smart music editors for each genre and updated regularly under Apple Music’s New tab, are my single favorite feature of the service. Almost all of my music discovery in the last nine months has been courtesy of the A-List Alternative playlist.
The A-List playlists are all roughly 50 songs long, so you can listen for quite a while before running out of entertainment. New songs are cycled on regularly, so any given song will live on the playlist for a few months before dropping off. I have been slowly been building a playlist of my own, featuring my favorite songs from the Alternative A-List playlist as well as a few other editor playlists, like Alternative Chill, and the result is an 80-minute playlist of songs largely by bands I’ve never heard of, that I now love.