Nearly Half of Apple Music Users in U.S. No Longer Using Free Trial

[charlituna]

The thing that stands out about that article is that is based on 5000 users out of many millions that use it?

exactly. 5000 and how did they find them. Apple has direct access to the full numbers not some tiny cut

 

[Aaplipad]

Just turned off my trial and renewal. Extremely disappointed in Apple for a poorly developed product. This is MobileMe disaster version 2. My music got duped. Couldn't sync playlists across an iMac, iPhone and iPad . Spoke to 7 apple techs and none of them knew what to do to correct the problem. I would wait 6 months to a year before trying Apple music. It's just not ready for the public.

 

[Nuvi]

I wanted to like Apple Music but unfortunately I don't. I have Sonos system so not being able to listen Apple Music with it is real shame (sure, Apple Music is coming but Spotify is already there...) Also, the Apple Music's recommendations are very limited and are not including all the genres I listen to. Therefore, I'm quitting my trial with Apple Music very soon.

 

[mejsric]

Update: In a statement to The Verge regarding this survey, Apple said 79 percent of people who signed up for the Apple Music free trial are still using Apple Music.

Article Link: Nearly Half of Apple Music Users in U.S. No Longer Using Free Trial

This tiny updates! You guys should create new article for it. And also that is better page hits since its another article fanboy war... More income...

Btw.. Just funny how many people here are rejoicing over the 5000 people surveyed. LOL

 

[Keirasplace]

exactly. 5000 and how did they find them. Apple has direct access to the full numbers not some tiny cut

5000 would be more than adequate if the sampling was representative of the people who actually tried Apple Music. Considering how massively off they are, their sampling is woefully bad; back to the drawing board it seams.

 

[Keirasplace]

#1 They may have been randomly chosen, but it doesn't matter unless the selected participants are somehow forced to take the survey. If they can opt-out of the survey, that's a HUGE source of selection bias and pretty much already nullifies the validity of the data. After that, even if your data analysis is performed perfectly, you've performed it on crap data.

#2 "Truth"? How are you judging that 5000 (<0.1% of the overall Apple Music users) is "representative enough"? By gut feeling? They haven't revealed any of their methodology, not the least of which requires a "power analysis" to demonstrate that 5000 people is enough.

In my experience, most of these for-profit data analysis companies are pretty lazy with their methodology. Since no one's health is at stake, they can get away with playing fast and loose with their calculations. No one's going to press them all that hard to see their homework. I've seen a lot of **** analysis being done in the financial press. The more controversial their results, the more money they make. If their survey results don't make waves in the press, they can't stay in business.

As statisticians like to say, "78.4% of all data is made up."

5000 is more than enough if your sampling reflects your population. That's the difficult part. They are so massively off so I'm going to say their sampling something else than Apple Music Users, or one particular segment of them at the very least. If they could at least determine which segment they touched, they'd get useful info out of their mess. As is, this is complete disinformation.

 

[Keirasplace]

truth be told, that is representative enough, as long as they were randomly chosen.

Random is not enough, it must reflect the population you want info on, or they'll lose a lot of info from hitting too large. Say they sampled randomly the whole US population; a quite expensive and hard thing to do. Find out 5% tried out in the first 5 weeks, well even with a massive nationwide sample of 5000, they'd only have 250 Apple music users. The margin of error on any info about them would be quite large but would at least give a good ballpark figure. But, it's way way way unlikely anyone would do this kind of expensive survey for something like this and who the hell would pay for it!

To make this more viable financially, those firms takes many shortcuts in trying to cut sampling/survey costs while remaining supposedly representative. It's here that most of the problems occur. No matter how big their numbers are, they don't reflect the population.

 

[Macgeda]

If the numbers are legit, it's a sad message to the team that worked hard to make Apple Music a hit.
I agree 100% with all who complained about the user experience, the bugs and overall experience being bounced between two systems (the coexisting selling and the streaming business in one package).

Hopefully they will launch a promising update this fall but I'm afraid by the sheer amount of requests it might take them much longer to make it right first and competitive second.

I liked the edge to edge design of the actual music player though.

 

[dampfnudel]

Just turned off my trial and renewal. Extremely disappointed in Apple for a poorly developed product. This is MobileMe disaster version 2. My music got duped. Couldn't sync playlists across an iMac, iPhone and iPad . Spoke to 7 apple techs and none of them knew what to do to correct the problem. I would wait 6 months to a year before trying Apple music. It's just not ready for the public.

Yeah, I think Apple should've waited until next year to introduce Apple Music. I think they're putting too much pressure on themselves to succeed, leading to unrealistic expectations in an unrealistic period of time.

 

[coolsean20]

Getting Spotify back right now. This is rediculous. I was syncing some albums for offline play, and my whole 6+ resprung and deleted my whole iCloud music library. Sorry Apple, until your junk is fixed, I won't be back. So frustrating.

 

[Merode]

I've encountered several bugs while using Apple Music. I also prefer the way Spotify suggests you music and playlists. Besides, AM is not available on WP which I'm currently using.

Overall, I'm okay with using Spotify. It's not like I have to use AM because I use (mostly, just switched an iPhone for WP) Apple products.

I believe that in 1-2 years when they iron out bugs from AM, it's going to be great. I just don't like the way people hate on Spotify just because Apple suddenly offers AM. No need for fanaticism - if the service is great it's going to defend itself alone.

Swifty is all about money and she's accepted AM just because Apple is paying her for trial period. I say that even though I really like her music - that's the truth. If Apple ever offers free playback with ads, she's going to quit just like with Spotify. She's very popular and therefore in position that allows her for such actions. It might change after one unsuccessfull album.

 

[navaira]

Update: In a statement to The Verge regarding this survey, Apple said 79 percent of people who signed up for the Apple Music free trial are still using Apple Music.

What's "using" though?

If I removed the Apple Music tabs in iTunes 12.2.1, but haven't cancelled my subscription, am I still using AM?
If I downgraded my iTunes to 12.1, am I still using AM?
If I upgraded it back to 12.2.2 when someone on the forum told me how to get around a bug that was pissing me off, and the AM tabs re-appeared, but I never streamed a track, am I still using AM?
If I sometimes look at For You playlists hoping they will get better, they don't, and I go back to My Music tab, am I still using AM?

I disabled the automatic renewal on day one, and I checked twice to make sure it hasn't "accidentally" re-enabled itself.

 

[Frumious B]

One thing I don't like about Google Play Music is that they convert AAC files to MP3 when uploading, which causes a quality loss (tandem loss).

I hate that too because I have used AAC almost exclusively for portable devices for the past 5-6 years, but I really like their streaming service and the option to store 50,000 tracks is free even if you don't subscribe. Fortunately I have my entire library backed up in lossless so I was able to spool off mp3s for Google and now I'm "all in".

 

[Frumious B]

I'm really happy with Google and the "fix incorrect match" feature is very useful in cases where a song hasn't been matched properly or you have a specific CD version of an album you want to have in your streaming library such as the DCC Pet Sounds. I've got a Chromecast set up now in my main listening area now with a box that outputs audio to my stereo without the need to have the TV on.

 

[johngordon]

To each her own I guess. You like AM, and that's good for you. I'm curious though. What 3rd party software do you have to wonder about? I honestly don't know what that means. Are you talking about Spotify, All Access, Rdio, Tidal, and the like? If so, what is there to wonder about?
As for the features you like, they're present in pretty much all the music services. I have nothing against AM. I simply stated it brings nothing new or compelling that can't be found on any other service. That's not a knock. It just is.

Is it possible in Spotify (on the iPhone) to view a list of all the artists in your music collection, which is a combination of existing music (bought or otherwise) plus stuff you have saved to your collection from Spotify?

Is it possible to tap on an artist and view a list of all the albums by that artist, rather than a single long list of songs?

If they are, I haven't figured them out. Probably not deal breakers for many (and wasn't for me, as I was using Spotify quite a bit before AM), but those two things, for me, make AM a better option.

 

[johngordon]

No, it shows what low standards they have, and how cheap they are.

This, or how much music they listen to. Although presumably a reasonable amount if they signed up for the trial in the first place.

As its the same price as buying one album a month, it seems like a no brainer to me, for anyone who just buys 10-12 albums a year. Or possibly even less, because with a streaming subscription you can also listen to a load of albums you might be interested in enough to hear, but probably wouldn't have bought.

For a good while the barrier for me was the availability and cost of data, but even on 4G that is a lot more affordable now - I am paying £15 a month in the UK for 3GB data, unlimited texts and 500 mins for my phone which seems pretty good.

 

[Dave245]

I really like Apple Music, I find that I'm listening to a lot more music and a lot more variety. I love the fact that you can download the tracks for offline listening. I wasn't sold at first but I am now. Let's not forget that this is a new service for Apple so there will be problems but it will only get better with time, I think Eddy Cue has said as much.

 

[johngordon]

5000 is a pathetic sample size of a global service.

This is barely a survey at all. Also asking a demographic consisting of young teenagers are more likely to favour a free service over a paid one even with a free trial due to financial restrictions.

Macrumors is getting close to posting click bait far too often with this sort of "news"

Assuming the samples is a fairly random sample, then its a good enough sample size to be accurate to around +/- 1.5%.

So actually pretty good.

 

[johngordon]

Can you blame people. It has a horribly confusing interface that especially on mobile makes listening to music awful.

The UI in iTunes needs some work, but the phone seems fine to me.

My workaround for the apparently confusing interface:

1. Open AM.
2. Tap My Music tab (if its not already on that).
3. Scroll through artist list to find artist.
4. Tap on artist I want to listen to, which shows me all their albums.
5. Tap on the album I want to listen to.

Maybe I'm just unusually smart, because I don't find that remotely difficult or confusing.

 

[johngordon]

Lol. sounds like PR speak but I am truly a fan. I actually enjoy Zane and the rest of the DJs. When the DJs talk about the artists and music with such passion it makes it more exciting, at least to me.

Exactly - a big part of music is the shared, collective element of enjoying it, talking about it with friends, going to gigs with people. And radio, for me, is still a big part of that because its a more collective, shared experience than just listening to a playlist.

I tend to listen to the radio more when I'm working (I work from home), and listening to albums / playlists when I'm out and about with my phone.

 

[johngordon]

A win? Is it a win to you that half the users had quit a free service?

How does it compare to any other free trial for any other product or service you can think of?

If 20% of trial users become paying customers, is that typically above or below the average?

 

[johngordon]

Speaking as a biostatistician here, not really. If there were only a total of 5 million (and there were actually many more if I recall), 5000 would be only 0.1% of the total. Off the top of my head that wouldn't be sufficient, though figuring the precise minimum sample size would require an analysis of statistical power.

With statistics and sample sizes, I thought the total size of the population was irrelevant?

Assuming a random, normally distributed sample, isn't the equation for the margin of error:

The margin of error in a sample = 1 divided by the square root of the number of people in the sample

So if the sample size is 5000, the margin of error will be about 1.4%.

The total population could be 50,000 or 500,000,000 and it wouldn't change that.

 

[johngordon]

So the survey was off by 27%. Someone needs to revise their methodology. My guess is leading questions and users unaware what actually constitutes "using" Apple Music.

Very probably, as in:

"Are you familiar with Apple Music?"

"Yes, I've been buying albums from it for years!"

 

[johngordon]

I hate the fact I can't shuffle my artist. That is driving me nuts. Every time I want to listen to music and go to my iphone I remember that I can't shuffle music from an artist .I have to go to my apple watch to shuffle music from an artist. It's the most frustrating thing in the world that use to be there.

I don't know if they have added to 8.4 yet, but you can do this in the iOS 9 beta.

 

[johngordon]

I wanted to like Apple Music but unfortunately I don't. I have Sonos system so not being able to listen Apple Music with it is real shame (sure, Apple Music is coming but Spotify is already there...) Also, the Apple Music's recommendations are very limited and are not including all the genres I listen to. Therefore, I'm quitting my trial with Apple Music very soon.

How much stuff have you been tapping the heart icon for? That's mainly what it uses to learn what sort of stuff you like.

The more you put into doing that, the better the recommendations become over time.

Its not going to just magically know what to recommend people out of the box.