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How Apple Music's Liking System Works to Customize 'For You' Recommendations
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That's the only way, sorry. You can look at all your recently played from a station in iTunes by clicking right of the song currently playing. It'll have a drop down menu to show you everything that's been played.
You're so edgy.
After much (well, to be honest not that much) pain and suffering I think I understand where the bug stems from.
It seems things in Apple Music have 2 types of identifiers (IDs). To prove the point here are couple cases (all using iPhone's Music app).
Say you're listening for some playlist from "For You" tab and you really like the song. So you "Love" it by clicking that heart icon. It turns black/red (depending where you're). The you decide to add this song to "My Music". After couple seconds of doing just that the heart icon turns off as if you have never liked that song. It does not appear as loved in my iTunes library and does not get added to "Loved" Smart Playlist. If you "Love" it again from the same screen where it turned off, all gets well.
Now, if you revert the course of action and first add it to "My Music" and then "Love" it then ... it depends. Depends on how quickly you click "Love" button. If too quickly, you will see it get red/black and then in a couple seconds turn off. If you instead wait few seconds and tap "Love", you will see it work as expected.
Similarly, clicking "..." on the now playing song and selecting that top most menu item that is the song itself shows "Unknown Artist, Unknown Album" blank page IF the song playing is not from "My Music". If you add it to "My Music", and then open it via "...", you will see a page with it, though just with the stuff from "My Music". There are buttons to see all songs from that album, view other albums, and similar artists.
So, it seems that songs have their Apple Music cloud IDs, but when you add it to "My Music" they get another ID. And then some functionality doesn't "map" these IDs, or uses wrong ID etc.
EDIT (Added): For the same reason "Love" icon is not highlighted for the songs that you play via "For You" playlist that are already in "My Music" with "Love" icon set for them. Those seem to have different IDs. End EDIT.
It sucks that such bugs are there, but I have no doubts they will be squished sooner or later.
Knowing all this my "workflow" with the songs from Apple Music that I liked is:
1. "..." -> "Add to My Music"
2. Wait 2-3 seconds.
3. Tap "Love".
4. If it turns off again, tap "Love" again.
It sucks but I can live with it as benefits far outweigh this.
What's important here is that Apple has built great platform that make me find tons of great music and is easy to use once I build My Music library. Spotify is far behind. Full disclosure - I couldn't care less about Spotify's friends/social playlists or whatever they call it.
Apple Music's main draw is its focus on curation and its ability to learn about your music preferences to provide recommendations that suit your tastes. Apple's new Music app focuses heavily on content discovery, with an entire "For You" section dedicated to recommendations.
According to Apple, its music experts "handpick songs, artists, and albums based on what you listen to and like," and this content is what populates the "For You" section. Apple's explained that "For You" recommendations get better over time based on "whether you love a song or not," but the company hasn't explicitly spelled out how to best use likes and listens to better tailor Apple Music to your tastes.
To clear up confusion on how recommendations work, The Loop's Jim Dalrymple has spoken directly with Apple to get some insight on how the "Like" feature in Apple Music works to affect recommendations, and he's penned a useful guide on liking from the information he obtained.
Any song played from Beats 1 radio, a default radio station, a curated playlist, or from a search can be liked by expanding the miniplayer and tapping the heart icon. You can essentially heart anything that's playing via Apple Music.
As Dalrymple explains, tapping the heart button on a song you like influences the content that's then displayed in the "For You" section of Apple Music. As more content is liked, the feature gets a better idea of each individual user's tastes, and is able to offer up a more tailored selection of music. Music that's added to a library and music that's played in full also affects "For You."Radio stations created from individual songs, done by tapping on the hamburger button when any song is playing and choosing "Start Station," work a bit differently. Instead of displaying a heart, these playlists display a star. Tapping the star allows you to choose "Play More Like This" or "Play Less Like This" to tune a radio station to your particular tastes at that time without affecting overall "For You" recommendations.
Pressing on any album or playlist recommendation in "For You" gives you an option to customize the section even more, by choosing "I Don't Like This Suggestion." It appears that this customization option is limited to iOS devices for the time being, as Apple Music on Mac doesn't offer this menu.
Apple Music's ability to offer up intensively tailored song recommendations over time may be one of the reasons why Apple insisted on giving users a three month trial to experience the service. Regularly liking songs and culling the "For You" section of recommendations that aren't suitable should vastly change the quality of suggestions over the course of the next few months.
Article Link: How Apple Music's Liking System Works to Customize 'For You' Recommendations
According to Apple, its music experts "handpick songs, artists, and albums based on what you listen to and like,
Yeah, Someone by hand selects songs for the user. Sure...
Logical functionality would be to allow us to single or double tap the heart. Single is like ... double is like and add to My Music. Obviously, the heart would need a third visual state. Ideas? Thoughts?
I decided to give Apple Music a real chance by fully deleting my spotify.
So far, I see alot of similarities, and the stuff apple music doesn't provide me, I never used on spotify anyways.
The thing that is convincing me to stick with apple music is:
1. the integration with all my apple products, making it harder for me to leave lol.
2. 15$ for 6 people.
So far, I see alot of similarities, and the stuff apple music doesn't provide me, I never used on spotify anyways.
The thing that is convincing me to stick with apple music is:
1. the integration with all my apple products, making it harder for me to leave lol.
2. 15$ for 6 people.
It would help if it looked at my library and/or purchases during initial setup (or even just pulled data from Genius). What I ended up with after the initial setup was surprisingly limited, missing the artists that most dominate my library and purchases. I see "For You" updating based on music that I've listened to (recommending bands that I searched for and listened to, which must require a real genius to code that algorithm), but I don't see any evidence that it has updated based on nearly 50 albums that I hearted from a single artist in my library. I don't expect it to recommend albums that I already own (which it does do of course, another brilliant algorithm), but I would expect it to recommend albums from other artists that are similar to an artist that is prominent in my library.
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Well, there are limits to what algorithms can do. If you want things perfect, hire someone to literally hand pick music that you like.
What "For You" comes up for me with is pretty good and much better than any other services I have used. And I have used a few. All around Apple Music is much better. There are things that it does worse than others, but if I'm to have a single service like this, it's certainly Apply Music.
By the way, continuing "2 kinds of IDs" thing, I have noticed couple tracks that don't show up in my Loved Smart Playlist. Turns out, if I sort by Loved in My Music, they appear with non-Loved ones, but with Loved icon set. Really bizarre. Just deleted and re-added them and "Loved". Fine now. These bugs are surely annoying...
Yeah, I am finding that to be true. While Spotify has become less usable since they removed the Star playlist functionality, I can at least quickly organize my tracks and drag & drop entire albums to a playlist without wondering if it *stuck.* I've been so busy trying to get the basics to work that I haven't been able to see if the "For You" section even matters over time.
What's fascinating to me is even though my iPad Mini is a bit on the slow side, I haven't had to deal with most of the nonsense I have faced with iTunes on my Windows machines. I have had to sign in and out multiple times, deauthorize all of my computers, sync and resync Genius & iCloud to get access to the same materials my iPad is apparently able to do immediately. For a while I had a smart playlists with tracks "loved" showing up, and then with one random problem, all of my work went away. When I get everything back up and running again with the above solutions, I then spent about 2x's the amount of time trying to "Love" the same tracks I did before. All of which would have taken a fraction of the time on Spotify.
If it weren't for the power of smart playlists and my genuine interest in seeing if I can get this thing fully functional, I wouldn't have bothered. I've had more pleasure completely tweaking Foobar 2000 than I have had trying to use Apple Music. And that's really disappointing me, because several years ago I would never have dreamed that iTunes could have turned into such a disorganized mess.
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Please please PLEASE tell me how you can create a smart playlist for your hearted music (or any kind of smart playlist) in Apple Music on iOS!!! I want this feature badly and assumed it wasn't there. But apparently I missed something. Can you help me find this?
Anyone know what happened to my iTunes Radio stations? I accidentally updated my iTunes, and now they're gone. 
Edit: Restarted iTunes like 3 times, and now they're back. Okay...
Well, the new interface certainly looks better.
Edit: Restarted iTunes like 3 times, and now they're back. Okay...
Well, the new interface certainly looks better.
Yet another terrible UX decision in this app.Press and hold on the suggested playlist or album on For You tab and the context menu containing this option will show up. I know, very intuitive.
Anyone know what happened to my iTunes Radio stations? They're gone.
If you click on "radio" at the bottom, they should be under "Recently Played" right under the Beats1 Banner. Thats were mine are at anyway.
Yeah, but for some reason, they weren't showing up. I quit and re-opened iTunes until they were there. Seems like a bug.
Press and hold on the suggested playlist or album on For You tab and the context menu containing this option will show up. I know, very intuitive.
You do realise what they're trying to do? They are deliberately crippling the user experience by implementing these new non-intuitive user interface elements. Why? So that in a few months they can introduce Force Touch on iPhone and iPad and show how much needed this hardware feature is!
More info on a song? Just hard press it and boom! It's there. Magic! How did we live 8 years without it.
As far as I know there is no way to create a Smart Playlist on iOS, the functionality to build these kind of filters is not there. But if you create them in iTunes under your account they synchronize to iOS and seem to update automatically on iOS too.
I have to say: this is the first time I'm confused by using a Apple product and needed to search for a guide on how to use Apple Music or the new music app but I have still some open questions:
- Where are the "Hearts" stored? I updated to 8.4, used Apple Music and restored my iPhone which I haven't done since iOS7 (wanted a "clean install" and clean up my app library) but now the songs I hearted are not hearted anymore? Isn't this information synced to with iCloud?
- Is there a way to see a list of hearted songs? This would be super useful. My workaround is a playlist called "iLike" and put all songs in it I hearted ... which is somewhat cumbersome.
- When a song is playing form a curated playlist which I like and I want to quickly switch to the artist or the album, is there a way by tabing something or do I have to search for it?
Where do broken hearts go? Can they find their way home?
The fact is that "hearts" are there only to train the For You section. Nothing else. They are a general "oh, I like it" while you're listening to a song.
To do anything different, you have first to add that song, album, playlist to your music and then treat it like it was before Apple Music. For example, using the 5-stars system in combination with smart playlist (that, however, can only be created in iTunes) you can have a Favorites playlist that gets constantly updated. And so on.
Considering the last question, that is the worst issue about Apple Music: there's no way (at least that I can find) to switch to the artist page when listening to a song. Frustrating.