Of course, Apple still pushes its overpriced Macs, but the focus there seems to be on developers (for the more expensive stuff--big monitors, workstations, etc.) or people (probably corporate workers, developers, etc.) using MacBooks. In both cases, the focus seems to be on machines used for doing work. I'm just guessing, but I would guess that most MacOS users who want to listen to (Apple) music would do so on their personal device, i.e. their iPhone, rather than their MacOS device which is probably owned and managed by their employer.
This is crazy. Not sure how they expect anyone to keep using their service with such attitude.
Perhaps it is a lock-in strategy: don’t leave or you lose months or even years of your music habits.
At the same time, both Spotify and YouTube Music keep all the data to this day.
One might argue that they free plans, so they have to keep it. And I would say “I don’t care”. If I can’t rely on your service to keep a list of songs - I am not using it.
Damn, they could utilize my iCloud account. Or allow me to export a text file with that data, so I could import it back later. But no. No money - you are screwed.
My annual Apple Music subscription lapsed for one day, and my entire library was gone the next day when I resubscribed for another year.
Apple are allowed to make whatever customer hostile choices they want. As a former Apple Music customer, I’m not making that mistake again.
Playlists are basically zero cost to store. You would spend more $ on delete processing than keeping them around for eternity. So it's just not well thought use-case, implemented without attempt to view the whole picture.
My account is still there. I can still use it. I am pretty sure it has some historic data there as well. Probably my old lambdas are still laying around.
Erasing a music app data after just a couple of months is idiotic, even more for a company with such deep pockets like Apple.
I use Cider on my desktop but mobile is still a challenge.
Some items now stay greyed out because they don’t have a license. And some versions got replaced (eg, to the remastered ones).
Perhaps things have changed, but 10 or so years ago I "uploaded" my music to Spotify and it didn't actually upload anything, nor did it play my local music.
Rather, spotify used whatever it had in its database with the same name/artist, which wasn't always the same recording or even the same song.
And then there were the ads. No thanks.
I have my own library of more than 22,000 tracks and use Winamp, Jellyfin and VLC to play them wherever I happen to be. No muss, no fuss, and most importantly, no ads.
From what I could tell when choosing AM over Spotify, the latter has a lot of playlists for discovery and I would never use my streaming service for discovery as it encourages the service to promote music it is paid to promote.
Of course AM is annoying too because 3 out of 5 navigation icons along the bottom of the UI are for discovery. But AM has Siri integration, which works some of the time… :-/