A close look at Apple Music, a good article from music lover.

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There are a lot of confusions about Apple Music. What exactly is it? What will you get out of it. Kirk McElhearn explained about it in his good article: Apple Music: a Close Look at How it Works

First, Apple Music integrate streaming track into your library. So if you have one album of one certain artist, now you will have all of them.
If you have a good playlist of Rock music, for example, now you can add more rock musics that you don't have in your own library into it. You don't have to re-create your playlists from scratch.

This suggests that Apple Music will work as I suggested in this article. I suggested that Apple would integrate streaming tracks into your library, allowing you to make playlists with tracks you own and tracks you rent.

For who's deciding between Spotify and Apple Music.

Apple Music is clearly designed for those users who already have an iTunes library. If you’re a Spotify user, and only listen to music through that service, there’s little incentive to switch. But if you do have music in your iTunes library, then Apple Music, by allowing you to combine your existing library and streamed tracks, makes it much easier to use what you already own.

About Discovery

As such, Apple Music includes For You, a section of the Music app on iOS, and of iTunes, that recommends music. Apple claims this is done by humans, but they simply can’t have enough humans who know enough music to do this.
I think much of this “discovery” is powered by Genius, which I’ve found works fairly well, at least to make playlists from my library.

About playlists

There will also be lots of playlists: genre playlists, “mood” playlists, “handcrafted playlists,” and more. This could work; or, for more eclectic tastes, it might not.

About Apple Music and iTunes Match

Apple Music is therefore an extension of iTunes Match, with one important difference: there does not seem to be any limit in the number of tracks you can have. This is huge; many music lovers have long been irked by the 25,000-track limit of iTunes Match. However, since Apple Music will undoubtedly stream music with DRM, the matched and streamed tracks will contain DRM.

About Radio. With Apple Music subscription, iTunes Radio will be available worldwide.

There will still be other radio stations, what is currently iTunes Radio. These algorithm-driven stations will work as before, but if you have an Apple Music subscription, you’ll be able to skip as many tracks as you want (compared with six tracks per station, per hour, currently).
Note that without an Apple Music subscription, you can still listen to these radio stations. iTunes Radio stations will be ad-supported for non-subscribers, and it’s not clear whether Beats 1 will have ads or not. And it’s worth noting that iTunes Radio doesn’t seem to be available in countries other than the US and Australia, where it is currently available, without a subscription.

About classical music

I know lots of my readers wonder about this. It’s obvious that the radio stations and playlists won’t do anything useful for classical music, but accessing much or most of the iTunes Store’s library of music will provide a huge library of classical music. You’ll be able to listen to what you want, make playlists (such as all of a given composer’s symphonies or string trios, not “the best adagios”). As such, this could be a good deal.

Bonus on the quality of streaming: No, CNN, Apple Music Will not Sound Worse

What they don’t consider, however, is that AAC – also known as MP4 – is a much better codec. It won’t sound worse at that lower bit rate; it will sound just as good, if not better, than 320 kbps MP3 files. And, it saves you money on bandwidth.
While they point out that Spotify only uses 320 kbps for paid subscribers (others get 96 or 160 kbps), they still manage to say that Apple Music will sound worse. And they don’t point out that Spotify uses Ogg Vorbis files, which are much lower quality than either MP3 or AAC.

There you go...