Apple Music’s Bad Playlist Art

This is my first month with Apple Music. It’s … different.

(Ha. Ha. Get it? What a reminder: Apple, from back when they were still exciting and not just another technological behemoth hell-bent on melting the world down for spare parts.)

I was on Spotify, and so far I’m pretty happy with the change to Apple Music — after all, not only does this giant music streaming app do a few things that I like a bit better than the other giant music streaming app, it also does all of the other things EXACTLY THE SAME.

Of course it does. They ARE the same, nearly. This entire migration reminded me that, despite the marketing and the design and the corporate overlord responsible, each of these streaming services is essentially identical. They stream 99.99% of the same artists. They offer all of the same features, and they’re all mostly available on the same devices.

I’m not choosing to move to Apple Music because of some mind-blowing shift in thinking — I’m choosing to move due to the small differences between the two.

So the focus shifts to comparing differences. Spotify has differences from Apple Music, which has differences from Tidal, which has differences from YouTube Music. Some differences are easy to give up — for example, I have no problem giving up some of Spotify’s worst features, such as how the app has become riddled with AI slop, or how the company is actively investing in AI weapons. These are things I can’t tolerate, and they finally forced my hand after being really close to switching due to previous, nearly-non-tolerable differences: the lack of artist compensation, the sudden influx of bad podcasts, Joe Rogan.

(There’s no cut and dry, of course — Apple themselves is not a saint, what with the exploitive labor and the antitrust of it all. Just buy vinyl direct from the artist — it’s the only safe bet.)

But beyond the political and social issues, I’ve been learning a lot about how much difference I can live with. Apple Music is missing a few features I’ve grown used to (stream counts, a common memory between devices, a focus on discovery), but I’m already forgetting about these as I get used to the new ecosystem.

The playlist art, though. It’s rough.

I make a lot of playlists, which means I get used to a lot of playlist cover art. For this newsletter, I actually make my own cover art, pulled from a template I created in Figma. It’s easy, and it makes things look better than the default, which for Spotify is just a grid of album art, pulling from the first four unique albums found in the playlist. It’s not ideal, but at least it’s related to the music. If I don’t create my own cover art, I’m not endlessly bothered by the mashup that Spotify chooses.

But Apple Music? Oof. There’s a weird aesthetic happening over at Apple these days — the liquid whatever of the new iOS is maybe one of the worst design choices I’ve ever seen, or at least the worst since the skeuomorphic pleather calendar. Apple Music, which is already a much clunkier app than Spotify, enforces that clunkiness with some dire auto-generated playlist defaults: a generic gradient seemingly unrelated to anything, with the playlist title (adorned in Apple’s already generic-ass font) slapped on top.

It turns out this was the difference I couldn’t tolerate.

And so, this past week, after meticulously using an app called Playlisty to move roughly 100 playlists into Apple Music, I’ve begun developing reusable cover art templates for OTHER playlist types. I have templates for concert setlists (image of band on the tour in question, name of band, and date), genre playlists (black-and-white photo of something connected to that genre, title based on a well-known lyric), and decade playlists (big bold year on top of a black-and-white image from that decade’s music). It’s taken more time, but that’s what I needed to do to make the differences okay. That’s what I needed to do in order to move forward.

We all grow up in different situations — in different towns and in different countries and with different parents — and part of that growing up is learning how to handle differences. We learn it from our culture, and we learn it from our parents, and we learn it from the people we look up to. And, for us as humans all sharing the same world, the differences are really all that matter. The differences are what give us our identity — our personality.

Humans share over 99% of their DNA with one another. Songs are written using the same set of notes, books are written using the same structure of language, and recipes are all created with specific core elements at heart. Every song, every home, every pumpkin pie, every human is essentially identical save these small percentages of difference. Small percentages of distinction and uniqueness.

And so when we choose our friends and our partners, we do so based on the ways they’re different from other people. When we settle into our beliefs and values, that spectrum ties closely to our ability to tolerate and at times celebrate differences.

The differences are what make the world interesting — the music you listen to, the way you decorate your space, your culture and your worldview. But embracing and celebrating differences — or even tolerating differences — isn’t a thing that comes naturally. It takes a bit of skill. It takes practice. It takes willingly showing interest in something beyond what you’re used to, adapting and being willing to change. For some things it’s as easy as setting up a new routine — some new templates, some layers and a common font — and for other things … it takes a lot more. It takes reassessing our own beliefs.

It takes patience, but mostly it just means being willing to be wrong. It means adapting, even if it’s not convenient, in order to make those differences work.

The last time I changed streaming services, it was because Rdio went out of business. I was forced, and I landed on Spotify because it was new, fresh, and exciting. Since then, the small differences are what kept me from leaving, until Spotify’s differences became too great — differences I could not tolerate, in the same way I can’t tolerate a recipe with olives, or a human with Nazi ideation. The luxury in being able to make a switch without being forced — to change and evolve out of your own volition — is really a privilege.

But it’s a privilege we all have. We can change anytime we like, as long as we’re willing to put in the work. We can change anytime we like, and we don’t need to wait until it’s too late.