Open Radar

 
Summary: The workflow for adding curated playlists to My Music means you will eventually lose track of all of those songs and won’t be able to find them again.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Find an Apple Music curated playlist you like. I used “New in Alternative” from Apple Music Editors > Alternative.
2. Click … and select Add to My Music
3. Listen to this playlist a lot of times so that you grow to really like it. Maybe use Make Available Offline so you can listen on a plane, or such.
4. Eventually, this playlist gets updated. It is “New in Alternative.”


Expected Results:

The original version of that playlist should still exist in My Music so that I can continue to listen to it. 

Actual Results:

The playlist gets updated and all of those songs are gone. They don’t even exist in My Music individually so that I can find them. This is quite aggravating because I had come to really enjoy those songs, and Apple Music was successful with the important goal of helping me discover new music. Then suddenly, that music is gone from under me.

Luckily I was able to screenshot my History and then manually recreate most of the songs in the playlist one-by-one, but I lost a few.

Notes:

There are a number of problems in the workflow of curated playlists:

- I can’t sync them to my Apple Watch (rdar://21674916). This is one of the key purposes of the Apple Watch/Music combination IMO.

- I don’t have a permanent link to them and they change out from beneath me. I don’t have a problem with the idea that playlists can change, especially “New in XXXXX” playlists.  I do have a problem with the fact that I can’t get my own copy of it without manually recreating it. Same goes for putting these playlists on my Apple Watch.

In either case, a workaround is to create my own playlist, go to the Apple Music Playlist, then select … > Add To > <newly created playlist>.

This does what I want. Gives me my own copy that I can sync to my watch, and won’t change on me.

Far be it for me to give Apple UI advice, but I think there should be two different concepts for curated playlists. 

1 - “Subscribe to this Playlist”. This would do what it does today: show up in Apple Music Playlists, changes when the Apple editors decide to change it, etc.

2 - “Add to My Music”. Makes my own copy of it. Adds all the songs to My iCloud Library. Allows me to sync to my watch, never changes from under me.