[AlexandrB]

But then why isn't Apple Music a big list of songs, like iTunes from 2004? I'd actually prefer that. The Apple Music streaming interface instead has headshots of artists I don't care about or abstract images for each "category". Like a lot of modern UX, it's the worst of all worlds: wasting a ton of space for the purpose of aesthetics while being less useful than earlier iterations - at least to me.

[vmception]

Spotify has what you are looking for.

But on the topic of Apple, I would say its just not that deep. Their UI/UX is factoring in the relevance of certain things, while also using some of the image metadata that all their audio files have associated with them. The graphics team factored in an ongoing music collector culture and their own preference and the medium its being played on (the phone and app system). It wouldn't be surprising if a future update did have basically a simple list, with a drilled-in view of what's playing, similar to most other music discovery apps.