[shadowfiend]

The criticisms here are 100% fair… But it's worth remembering that Spotify's fundamental unit is the user playlist. It's what the social experience is built around, it's what the user's experience is built around, it's what the consumption experience is built around.

Apple Music, on the other hand, has a pretty strong bent towards curation and suggestion. It's clearly oriented to encourage you to use the curated playlists that Apple Music's folks are creating, and other suggestions based on your tastes. It's also pretty good IMO at providing suggestions based on the music you're currently looking at so you can keep investigating.

I get the feeling the playlist functionality in iTunes 12.2 and the latest iOS is mostly the exact same as it was in previous versions—I don't think it's been integrated into Apple Music at all (yet?). Right now it's just a way of organizing things that are part of your music, rather than a way of organizing things that are part of Apple Music.

So, while it's perfectly fair to be frustrated with the playlist creation experience, I think it's also worth appreciating the fact that Apple stayed true to what they've been saying and marketing around Apple Music. Those user experiences are, at least for me, very straightforward and have generally been quite good. So maybe generalizing and saying “Apple Music is a Usability Nightmare” is overstating a tad… Even though saying “Apple Music's Playlist Story is a Usability Nightmare” maybe isn't.

[mbell]

> But it's worth remembering that Spotify's fundamental unit is the user playlist

I don't think that is true.

My interaction with Spotify is much more about listening to an artist or song and using 'more like this'. And the fundamental unit of sharing is 'friend x listened to this song'. If I know I like their tastes I tend to list to that song then, if I like it, listen to 'more like this'.

I spent about an hour earlier trying to use Apple Music via iTunes and left incredibly frustrated. I couldn't make it do anything I actually wanted it to do.

As a simple example, go to 'new' then, pick a genre from the incredibly awkwardly placed drop down, scroll down and you see 'top songs'. Cool, I thought, lets play the top songs from this genre! Except, as near as I can tell, there is actually no way to play those songs as a 'playlist'. You can click one at a time, and they play, but after each finishes it just stops.

[threeseed]

Weird for me it seems exactly right. I tend to share and follow playlists not individual songs.

Also I have had no issue getting Apple Music to work the way I want including what you were trying to achieve. I just clicked on Top Songs and it opened as a playlist where after the first song finished it played the next one. Maybe you were clicking the indvidiual songs ?