A Look At the Apple Music Web Beta

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. On this episode let's take a look at the new Apple Music for the web. 

MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content.

So Apple just introduced a beta of a web version of Apple Music. Until now Apple Music has been available to use in iTunes, of course the Music app on your iOS devices, and in a few other places like you can use it on the HomePod. You can even use it with Alexa. With the web version your Apple Music subscription is even more valuable because now you can play Apple Music in even more places.

You can get the beta version of Apple Music by simply going to beta.music.apple.com and you can access some things without even logging on. So you've got For You, Browse, and Radio. Under Browse you can actually look at some of these playlists or look at some of the albums here but you can only play the first thirty seconds of a song. So you have kind of a preview. You can see how well this works in your web browser if you like. For the other parts here basically they are just preview information here. If you try to use any of these it will ask you to signup for an account. You can't signup for an account right now here on the web. You still have to do it using one of the apps but once you're signed up then you can play here. You can Search. So you can see what's available in Apple Music. You can get results and go in and even see what's here and play short previews. 

That's what you get if you don't sign-in. So let's now sign-in to an Apple Music account and take a look. So now that I'm all signed in I have access to everything. So I can actually play full versions of the songs here. Not only that but if I go to Browse and For You, I actually get basically the same content I get in the Music or iTunes app with all of my albums, everything there, all my suggestions. I can look at Recently Added and go in the Library to artists and look at my artists.

You don't just have Apple Music here either. You do have iCloud Music as well. This is a service that's part of Apple Music that if you have something that Apple Music doesn't have in your iTunes collection, something you ripped from a CD or something like that, it's available across all your devices. Sure enough that music is available here. So you really do have access to all of your different music, even music that's nowhere anywhere available on Apple Music is available here because I have it in my iCloud Music collection.

You've got all the ways of viewing your music including songs, albums, artists. You can also view all of your playlists as well. Now what you don't have is you don't have the ability to build playlists. So if I look at a song here you would think I'd be able to click on the three dots and Add to Playlist. It doesn't. So that's not here yet. Remember this is a beta. Apple is calling this a beta specifically to tell us that not all the features may be there yet.

Of course this being a web app it doesn't have the drag and drop functionality we're used to on a Mac. It does have the Up Next functionality though, although you don't see it here because I made this window a little too small. If I expand the window a bit now I get a much better set of playback controls at the top and I get the Up Next list here. I also get Shuffle and Repeat options here as well. I get a Volume control. I don't see any way yet to access more song information like lyrics and things like that. But that might be to come as well.

What's the big deal. You can already play Apple Music in iTunes in Mojave, in the Music App in Catalina, and of course in the Music app on all your iOS devices. Why do you need a web version too? I comes in handy in a number of situations. What if you're working on something that doesn't have anyway to play back Apple Music. You do have iTunes in Windows but not everybody likes to install it. So now you can use the web version on a Windows machine. Also you can use it on Chrome OS as well and any other operating system that has a modern web browser but isn't  necessarily Mac or Windows.

But I think there's even a better use case. For instance if you're at work and you're using a Mac with a work Apple ID but your Apple Music account, with all your playlists and everything in it, that's your personal Apple ID. Now you can actually sign-in in the web browser and play Apple Music on your work Mac even though you're not signed into your Apple ID. This also could be possible where some Macs that have restrictions on the apps that can be installed or how you can log into them. So students using a Mac that's controlled by the school may not be able to do Apple Music normally but can do it here with the web version.

Of course in addition to that is the competition, Spotify, has a web version and a lot of people do find reasons to use it. So it's important for Apple to have this as well.