I love Apple Music. I’m not afraid to admit it — even after living with Spotify for the better part of a decade. Apple has even caught up to Spotify in terms of offering some fantastic personalized playlists. However, my playlists are filled with garbage due to one missing feature.
Apple Music has a bunch of personalized playlists now. While there wasn’t much to be had when it originally launched, the company obviously recognized a lot of the automatically generated playlists that Spotify offered like Discover Weekly and, of course, Spotify Wrapped — the annual playlist that put together all of your most listened to music from the last year.
Over the years, Apple Music got more and more into the personalized, automatically-generated playlist game. Now, the company has tons of options including Replay (it’s copy of Wrapped) as well as the Favorites Mix, Chill Mix, Get Up! Mix, New Music Mix, Heavy Rotation Mix, and the Friends Mix.
Not only has it added more of these playlists over the years, but it has also improved the algorithms used to decide which music is supposed to be in these playlists. While Spotify may still have the superior playlists due to there still being more of them, Apple Music has certainly been playing some serious catchup.
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So why do you ruin my playlists, Apple?
With all of this great momentum with personalized playlists, including the recently added Heavy Rotation playlist, you’d think I’d love listening to all of my For You playlists now. However, you’d be wrong. The longer I use Apple Music, the worse my For You playlists get — all because of one missing feature.
What’s the feature, you ask? Well, it’s one that, of course, Spotify has right now. Before I get to that, though, let me set you up with what the problem is. I love to listen to music while I work. Specifically, I love to listen to Lo-Fi music while I work.
I don’t think I’m unique here. Tons of people listen to instrumental music like this when they work — so much so that Apple has created quite a few playlists to accommodate people like us. From Lo-Fi Chill to Lo-Fi Sunday to the Chill Mix For You playlist, there are tons of options to choose from.
Replay 2024 playlist on Apple Music. Image source: José Adorno for BGR
So, I tend to leave playlists like these on during the workday. And therein lies the problem. Since I listen to these playlists all day, Apple Music thinks this is the music I LOVE. And boy, do they pack my For You playlists with it. Not U2. Not Death Cab for Cutie. Not Lights. Lo-Fi music has taken over all of my playlists.
Spotify has fixed this problem already with its “Exclude from your Taste Profile” feature. With Spotify, you can select this on a playlist to listen as much as you want without the app shoving this music into your Wrapped and other playlists. This is exactly the feature I need to see from Apple Music.
I need Apple Music to know that “Hey, I listen to a lot of Lo-Fi but that doesn’t mean my Favorites Mix should be 90% Lo-Fi Chill.” That’s background music, Apple! That’s not the artists that I love to kick back with or sing along to in the car.
Spotify UI on mobile. Image source: Spotify
If you looked at my Replay 2024 right now, you’d think I listened to nothing else. The lack of this feature has ruined my For You playlists, and I really hope that Apple Music rips off another feature from Spotify and adopts something very similar.
Maybe we’ll get lucky and get such a feature when Tim Cook and the team take the stage at WWDC 2024 on June 10th. I’ll certainly be crossing my fingers for it.