from Hacker News

Apple Music Style Guide

by gerjomarty on 7/13/21, 2:07 PM with 60 comments

  • by seabrookmx on 7/13/21, 4:03 PM

    Fun fact: I worked at a medium-sized music distributor, and Apple actually gives distributors a "score" based on how close they are to the style guide.

    If your score falls below a certain threshold the time between delivery of your content to Apple and when it goes on the store is delayed because of additional quality controls applied to your content.

    If you have a good score, it will go live immediately (assuming it's release date is in the past).

    Lots of software development at this company was driven directly by changes to this style guide, since iTunes / Apple music were such a huge portion of revenue.

  • by wodenokoto on 7/13/21, 4:22 PM

    > The spelling of an artist’s name must be correct and remain consistent across all content for that artist.

    However, some artists change names. Famously Prince, became "The artist formerly known as Prince" and then Prince again, but appears to only exist on iTunes/Apple Music as Prince.

    Meanwhile, Japanese artist Yumi Arai, changed her name to Yumi Matsutoya in 1976 after getting married and exists as two separate artists under former name and current name.

  • by wolverine876 on 7/13/21, 4:24 PM

    I'd like music metadata that is universally compatible across systems and across time (e.g., 50 years from now). Is there any such standard? Apple's Style Guide is the most complete I've seen, which makes it useful - how closely does it match my needs?

    In limited experience, just about the only standard metadata was album, track title, and artist (I forget the names of the exact fields). Not only do I want more, that works terribly for classical music where the artist could be the composer Wagner, the Chicago Symphony, conductor Solti, various soloists, etc.

  • by drcongo on 7/13/21, 4:15 PM

    I have music on Apple Music but no artist profile as Apple won't let me submit a picture without my face shown. Fine for Daft Punk though.

  • by sharkjacobs on 7/13/21, 5:34 PM

    > 1.10. Emojis. Do not use emojis in titles, artist names, lyrics, or other metadata.

    I read this and thought that surely, in the year of our lord 2021, there must be a song or album title or even an artist name which is all emojis, how do they handle that?

    But it seems like this is a pretty standard limitation across the industry[1].

    [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/eamonnforde/2021/05/19/emoji-na...

  • by Bud on 7/13/21, 5:02 PM

    Oh, dear. There's a glaring style error in line 2 of this document.

    It has quotation marks around "Print this Document". For no reason. That's not what quotation marks are for. That's not how anything works.

    The rest of the document looks useful, though.

  • by imwillofficial on 7/13/21, 5:33 PM

    As an former open format DJ with terabytes of music, I would have killed for this type of unified, thoughtful, and comprehensive music organization spec.

  • by paul7986 on 7/13/21, 4:05 PM

    The UX of Apple Music has always been shockingly bad as it's Apple. Most notable playing a playlist then going to play something else ..ugggh & omg!

    More detailed example... my friend sends me a link to their playlist .. i click it .. it starts playing then when im done listening to a few songs its time for me to say hey siri play something outside of the playlist. When I do Apple Music pops up this message saying do you want to keep the playlist queued .. with two options "keep," or "clear," what im done with playing it .. i want to hear another song without having to mess with my phone/read or understand a message while driving. Just save this playlist for me and ill go back and play it later ... horrible and dangerous UX(annoying when not driving)! Spotify is totally different and does as expected!

    A better UX is just play what I asked no stupid pop up and when I say Siri start XYZ playlist it re-starts it from beginning and or Hey Siri start XYZ playlist from last played song. That is a safer UX and isnt Apple Music usage 50% in the car?

    Interestingly i see im being downvoted and upvoted .. would enjoy hearing others thoughts! Had a fun arguement with a friend about this!

  • by chrisseaton on 7/13/21, 4:34 PM

    > "Print this Document"

    Is this some kind of in-joke?