By Dan Moren
July 8, 2015 6:45 AM PT
Adding the rest of an album to My Music
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
We’re still getting used to Apple Music after a week, but the service has proved to be…let’s say “idiosyncratic.” Reader @BenSchin pointed out this bizarre annoyance a few days back: Say you have a single song from an album in My Music. Using my earlier tip, you can view that entire album. If that’s the only song you own, however, you’ll then need to tap Show Complete Album (left, below) to see the rest of the tracks.
However, in that listing, if you want to add the rest of those tracks to My Music, you’re out of luck–unless you want to tap the More (—-) button next to each individual track and add them individually (center, below).
But if you search for the same album on Apple Music, you’ll notice that there’s a + icon at the top, which lets you easily add the entire album to My Music (right, above).
It’s weird, to me, that these two screens co-exist. Especially since if I’m playing one song that I’ve purchased and decide I want to grab the entire album, it seems like it would be far more convenient to present that option to me on the (admittedly hard-to-find) album screen, rather than making me search for the album in Apple Music.
To me, this is emblematic of Apple Music’s slightly disjointed approach, and it’s part of the reason that I’m not wholly sold by the service yet. “My Music,” in particular, seems like a concept that doesn’t exactly line up with my definition of “mine,” since not everything in there is music that I actually own. But that’s in large part because Apple has for so long emphasized people owning their music.
Some of these are growing pains of Apple Music, to be sure, and others are a matter of the changing manner of consuming music. We’ll see over the next few months if some of the eccentricities get ironed out as the service matures.
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]
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