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

[Edgar Spayce]

Apple made the dangerous bet of curating crappy commercial music.

It means that it can pull lots of teenagers and youngsters with bad tastes that will evolve anyway, but it is cutting itself from the rest of the people.

Spotify does curation way better in that it is neutral and well learned, and Soundcloud is for pros following each others. I don't see a future for Apple Music given the bad decision they've taken over curating.

 

[corky5678]

Tim Cook has helped make Apple be the most valuable company of all time.

 

[ChasInVictoria]

It's too early, IMO, to get a real commitment from people at this point. I'm completely in love, SERIOUS love, with the "For You" section -- and for me that alone is worth the $15/month for a family subscription (even though there's just two of us). Like everyone else, I'm hoping they'll get the bugs sorted out soon, because My Music is kind of a mess. I've seen the issue, but it hasn't affected me too much because I presently mostly listen rather than download stuff, and from a listener standpoint the service has been really great so far. Once I think its safe to DL stuff for offline listening, Apple Music will be complete for me (well, I'd like Connect to be more active with artists I like, but apart from that).

 

[69Mustang]

Well I sure left the auto-renew on. I like using AM in iTunes with its tabbed interfaces to my stuff and the Store. Plus no third pary software to wonder about. It lets me play entire albums as "previews" to figure out --over as long as a time frame as it takes-- whether I want to buy something. It solves the problem of tiring of some pop buys even when I love them at first. This way I buy the ones I'm still listening to once in awhile after say five months, and ditch the downloaded "rented" ones.

As usual when I get to mention of turning on iCloud music library, I have to add here that I'm doing the trial on a separate laptop with a dedicated iPod touch associated to it, and starting from an empty iTunes library on that machine, adding in only a few albums of my own stuff. There's no way I want to involve all my personal collections, their metadata, their playlists. So this separate route works out best for me.

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.

 

[racer1441]

Yep. I bailed after a week. Was no where near as nice as just having your own music and do with it as you will.

 

[sorinc03]

Why are people asking for student discount? Students can't afford $10/month? The same students that go out clubbing and partying and spend $20-30+ per night?

 

[navaira]

When I read about people who love For You I'm pretty sure it has to do with the pink circles at the start.

Can I restart that process and do it again on a Mac?

 

[mi7chy]

A lot of the lackluster probably has to do with restrictive cross platform support. Plus, there are too many free options with better implementation. Take for example Soundcloud where I can play on mobile browser without having to install an app and it continues to play in-browser even when I turn off the display.

 

[John6Plus]

I'd like it if it worked.

In what I thought would be a totally safe, isolated way to enable iCloud Music Library, I turned it on for an empty iTunes library on a MBP with no other iTunes material on it. I saved a little bit of music. Ok, not integrated with my main library... but...

*looks at iPhone*

WTF, A.C. Newman is now the first one in my Artists list, ahead of AC/DC. He should be filed under N, as everyone who ever knew how to sort should know. I had certainly added the Sorted By tags to the tracks. Huh, Ryan Adams is still under A.. so maybe its isolated NOPE, there's Amy Winehouse under A. WTMFC??

I get it. Everything I had purchased from Apple - when I enabled iCML on my MBP using my account - all of it stripped the "sorted by" tags. Now, as you can guess people who bother using "sorted by" do give a flying monkey about their music organization. It is still horrifically broken, and since many of the problems existed with Match three years ago I will never trust any sort of music service of theirs.

Turned off iCML, auto Music Renewal, removed my iPhone's music and re-synced it. I'm done.

 

[LizKat]

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 mean. 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.

I think it was Spotify that I had to dl software if I wanted to have the stuff I liked be available offline... so to be fair I should give that a trial on the the "test" machine since I'm not as concerned about third party software on that one.

 

[Razeus]

Not surprised. The whole concept is a mess.

 

[gadgetguy03]

Have to love the headline spins on the same report.

MacRumors: Nearly Half of Apple Music Users In US No Longer Using Free Trial
Apple Insider: Survey: Majority of current Apple Music trial users likely to pay for subscription
9to5mac: Early Apple Music stats show major opportunities for growth, user retention, conversion from rival services

 

[kupkakez]

I like Apple Music. It is a little buggy and does crash on my 6+ occasionally but I just count it as growing pains. I guess time will tell if it improves or not. Until then I'm okay with using it.

 

[samcraig]

It's too early, IMO, to get a real commitment from people at this point. I'm completely in love, SERIOUS love, with the "For You" section -- and for me that alone is worth the $15/month for a family subscription (even though there's just two of us). Like everyone else, I'm hoping they'll get the bugs sorted out soon, because My Music is kind of a mess. I've seen the issue, but it hasn't affected me too much because I presently mostly listen rather than download stuff, and from a listener standpoint the service has been really great so far. Once I think its safe to DL stuff for offline listening, Apple Music will be complete for me (well, I'd like Connect to be more active with artists I like, but apart from that).

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.

I have a toddler anyway. It's nice to get the songs she's learning in daycare, etc. But I don't need anything too "deep" in way of curation or anything when I'm putting on "Let it Go" for the 3,342,944 time...

 

[sss4r]

Is there a way to edit the menu bar at the bottom of the app? I don't like how Apple Music takes over the music app. All the icons are for the pay service, with "My Music" relegated to the bottom-right; even then you have to dig a little to get to what I've already purchased. Apple TV is the same way. Beautiful menus to browse new and for-pay content, but the UI for browsing content I've already purchased is outdated. They focus too much on marketing and not enough on optimal UI for already purchased content in their products.

 

[Gasu E.]

61% turned off the auto-renewal... just comes to show how crappy the service Apple offers actually is...

If 39% of the people who try it for free go on to pay for it, that would be an amazingly successful conversion rate most business would kill for.

 

[randymac09]

Where's the shuffle for My Music? This is the only thing that I was bothered by. I read it's coming but not sure with what update.

I'm running iOS 9 Beta right now, so I don't know if it is out on 8.4. But if you go to "My Music" and pull the screen down, it's at the top.

 

[Tech198]

Believe me, the number would be higher than 61% if u also count people outside the U.S too..

I would bet a large potion of that 61% is due to the fact they have no idea how it works..... it matches "songs" only. so of course u'd expect a messy library while Apple fines tunes things..

The other 10% of that 61% probably are like 'ok, i'm done" without giving a few months.... I changed my tune on this, but only because i don't mind re-doing some incorrectly matched songs since i only have about 45 albums. but i can see the point of not sticking with AM just because of the volume of that alone.

 

[Mackinjosh]

In a world that Spotify didn't already exist in, this might be a service I'd pay for, but unfortunately for Apple that's not the world they released their service into. AM is more often than not unintuitive, and a lot of the time just downright broken when it comes to combining my own music. Spotify, to borrow Apple's favorite phrase, just works. And works brilliantly. Apple gave me no reason to switch. In fact they gave me every reason to extend my Spotify sub.

 

[johngordon]

I think it was @ErikGrim who posted a screenshot: nothing aligns on the Radio page. Recently Played text has left padding, Featured Stations does not. The radio stations in Recently Played have graphics, which do not align with Featured Stations graphics. On top of that we have the Beats One banner which doesn't align with anything else on the page at all. The New tab appears to have been changed since I last looked at it a few weeks ago, so I'll give them that. The For You playlists feature a lot of dark grey text on black, which is also conveniently very small. When you go into a playlist you see a lot of text surrounded by a lot of white space. There is no reason for this text to be so tiny. The tiny album covers next to songs make some sense in "80s Club Hits" playlist, but none whatsoever in "Intro to Basement Jaxx" (thank you for this recommendation Apple, I've only got five albums by Basement Jaxx so this will be useful). I don't know if this has been changed but track lengths are sometimes cut off, and you can't resize the column to see them because that would be too useful. I am on El Capitan beta now, so maybe this is not an issue in Yosemite, but the release dates column is also too small, so I get to find out "Red Alert" came out in the year "20..". I find myself squinting to read things on the screen.

Maybe if I'm feeling particularly bored I'll make a re-design of how AM would look if a graphic designer worked on the UI

Edit: Since I can't switch on iCloud (even if I was feeling particularly adventurous with my library) due to owning more than 25k tracks, Spotify Premium which costs me €4.99 per month provides the same functionality as Apple Music which would cost €9.99 per month. So it's a no-brainer for me. I know Apple plan to expand Cloud to 100k tracks, but after reading horror stories here and at other forums I frequent I don't really feel like trying it out.

Is that not all the iTunes stuff which I agree looks a bit poor. And doesn't just look poor, but does a terrible job of making basic info like Beats 1 schedules or DJ / show info available and prominent. So I'm absolutely with you on that one.

Aren't people mostly talking about the Music app, so on the iPhone? (And presumably iPad, although I haven't really used it on an iPad.) Which is what I think looks pretty decent now.

And I just noticed they have changed something that was one of my pet hates. One thing I really don't like with Spotify is you can't select an artist, see a list of their albums, select an album, and then select tracks on the album. If you select an artist, you just get a long list of tracks so have scroll through them all.

With AM, I think it used to list all the tracks for each album, but at least had the album as a heading. Then they changed it so that it only did that it didn't list the tracks if there were three or more albums. But looking at it now, it doesn't list the tracks if there is more than one album. Which is exactly what I always wanted Spotify to be like.

Its a small thing I guess, but it bugged me. And maybe that's half the trouble - so many people will have their own views as to how it should ideally work or be laid out, ad it can't possibly be everyone's ideal.

But yes - iTunes still needs a lot of work. I think the New tab is OK, Connect is what it is, but the For You and especially Radio tabs definitely need a good UI / Graphic designer to sort out.

 

[Gasu E.]

Is there such a thing as an average conversion rate for people moving from free trial to paid service? If so I guess how AM compares to that will be the telling figure.

This number would not be available, but undoubtedly if it were it would be much less tan 39%. I would guess 10% would be considered successful.

 

[cwt1nospam]

The headline is misleading because it puts a negative spin on what doesn't seem negative at all. Of course the majority of free users will drop off. What's interesting is that over 60% of users that are still using AM will most likely pay. That's a darn good conversion rate by any measure.

My thoughts exactly. I wonder if anyone viewing this as a negative — including the posters here — can show us a free trial of anything that has such an incredibly high conversion rate.

 

[Tech198]

i think the problem is that users expect it to just work "as it comes"

however maybe Apple did this all backwards and was asking to be in this position it didn't like..

They should have fully done this testing before launching it to the public.. rather than a pubic launch at WWDC, waiting for nasty comments from users, then stall them while they are "attempting' to fix it in the coming months..

Where as all that time wasted, people will just move elsewhere since they can't wait months. My would be red by now .... and i bet Apple's feeling the pressure.. It will be interesting to see how they can win those users back.

 

[DanielSw]

They should seriously consider student discount option.

Spotify offers 50% off.

Students don't need music. It's a luxury. They should be learning that they're expected to pay for what they want, and they should be learning how to make a living and how to make more money. Better learned earlier than later.

 

[DanielSw]

Ouch.. this could be ping part 2.

Nope. Ping is in the distant past.