Apple Music confounds me.

I just figured out how to rate songs in it tonight. You click the artist/title and it swaps to ratings. There’s nothing to give a hint that it’s there. There’s no way for me to find it unless I click random things in the interface. Which I did tonight out of frustration.

Rate a song

My wife asked me, “How can I play all the songs by a certain artist?” You used to be able to select an artist, and play everything you had by them. Now, the best we came up with is to add all the songs to up next. But it still doesn’t pay anything. You have to select a song, then Music will ask if you want to add X number of songs to your Up Next list. Which I already asked it to do.

Play entire artist?

Her solution was to go out and buy Cesium, a third-party music app just to regain a function she lost in the upgrade. It’s how she listens to music and Apple Music broke how she listened to it before. My solution was to continue using Groove.

Apple Music was clearly built for people who stream music. We are not those people.

But this got me to thinking about Apple. I stopped reading Apple blogs last year. Much of this coincided with moving to a job where I support a single application and no longer service computers for a living. So I didn’t need to be up on every latest move by the company.

Now, I don’t read anything regularly by Apple bloggers. I will dip a toe into the Apple stream periodically but I’ve found that if any of the heavy hitters writes something particularly good, I’ll find out about it another way.

I’ve crowd-sourced my Apple news.

This accomplished my goal of not seeing every news story about Apple blogged 15 times. Someone pointed out in a Slack room I hang out in today it was Apple Earnings Day. I had no idea. And I consider that a win.

Since I went on my Apple diet, I no longer read all the explanations of Apple’s new software. It’s been over a year and I no longer read through the long pieces on every change and tweak in the new versions of Apple’s software. So many of the little tips, tricks and hidden parts are lost on me.

The things I used to be able to answer without a second thought now lead me to Google. Did Apple’s software “Just Work” or did it only work if you were part of the club?

I honestly don’t know. But looking at it from outsider’s eyes, Apple Music is a convoluted mess of an application.