By Jason Snell for Macworld

June 1, 2022 7:05 AM PT

Apple Music has betrayed its most loyal listeners

My wife is a saint. She has to put up with me complaining every time we’re in our car listening to satellite radio and a DJ comes on. “You just don’t want to hear people talking,” she says, and she’s absolutely right. I accept that other people like listening to the prattling DJs, but I hate it and I will keep changing the channel until there’s a song I want to listen to again. I don’t want to hear about who is touring where, or who said something interesting at a show, or even the behind-the-scenes detail about how a song came to be written. Not when I’m just trying to listen to music.

That’s the great thing about streaming music services like Apple Music: whether you’re listening to a curated playlist or even a “radio station,” you can skip songs you don’t like and there’s no intrusion from voices. It’s all about the music.

Or at least, it was. But recently, Apple Music has made some changes, and they’re disastrous. A new tastemaker has apparently rolled into Apple Music HQ and decided that aggressive marketing to paying customers is the solution to a problem that literally nobody had. The result is a degraded Apple Music experience.

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