Apple is planning a major redesign of Apple Music and will announce the reboot’s release alongside iOS 10 at WWDC in June, according to 9to5Mac. A series of executive departures and tepid reviews of the service prompted Apple to make the overhaul, Bloomberg reports, and Apple is planning a marketing campaign to coincide with the release.
Below are the top seven features iDigitalTimes hopes to see in the new version of Apple Music when it is released in June.
More Beats Radio
Beats 1 Radio is one of the great things about Apple Music, and an expanded catalog of radio stations with the same sort of taste and style would go a long way toward strengthening Apple Music’s reputation. Just recently, Beats 1 Radio scooped an exclusive with Drake, getting a rare interview and a sneak peek at his new album before its release. More moments like this please.
Go Away With Connect
What exactly is Connect? Does anybody care? No, it just takes up a tab in the app like its spiritual ancestor iTunes Ping. Pro tip: If you want to disable Connect and reclaim the tab as a Playlists Tab, go to Settings -> General -> Restrictions -> Uncheck the Apple Music Connect option.
Better Playlists
Playlist support in Apple Music is aggravating. Things like the above, where users have to use a workaround to replace the Connect tab, can be aggravating and frustrating for no reason. Playlists need to better integrated into the service and easily accessible.
Social Media Implementation For Friends
Part of the reason that Spotify is so great is the wealth of playlists your friends and family have created. Apple Music needs to bite the bullet and offer Facebook integration (with some sort of incentive) to build that same personalized discovery library that gives Spotify its value.
Social Media implementation for Artists
The ability to instantly check an artist’s Facebook page, Twitter feed and Instagram posts in a one page, easy-to-digest way would be amazing. While it would require a lot of leg work for users to manually link the artists to their social media accounts, it could be done in reverse, where artists themselves log in once, in the same way that Tinder scrapes profiles pictures and Instagram posts
Better UI
This is practically confirmed, and we’re all better off for it. According to 9to5Mac, the new interface will be drop the translucent vibe and go back to simple color pairings (meaning no more fuzzy album art in the background) and emphasize large depictions of the album art elsewhere.
Better Organization & Sorting
Organization is a frustrating thing about Apple Music. Finding the album or artist you want to listen to is always a hassle, with the sorting options resetting themselves seemingly every time you open the app. Apple Music needs to become a place where a user can easily browse through their music collection and possibly discover new music, rather than an ugly, confusing barrier to enjoying music.
Apple also plans to announce new versions of iOS, tvOS, watchOS and Mac OS X at WWDC on June 13. Apple is planning on renaming Mac OS X to macOS, with the announcement about the switch likely happening at WWDC.
