Apple Music for Artists gets better for artists

I still miss the Apple Music festival.

Apple Music for Artists is the dashboard through which musicians and others making content available on Apple Music can tweak their presence on the service. The company has just improved the service.

Apple Music for Artists has improved

The essential music industry website, MusicAlly tells us the company has introduced new features designed to give acts of any size a few more useful tools they can use. These include:

A better profile section for acts

Artists can create a customized bio by answering questions, add their hometown, date of birth and more information about themselves, band members, collaborators, and others.

More lyrics and faster

Apple has been responsible for adding lyrics to Apple Music since the get-go. The company has now made it possible for acts to add lyrics themselves. This should be of particular significance to smaller, new, and self-published artists, I think.

Better tools

Artists, or in some cases brands/artist management, also get access to new permissions in Apple Music. This lets them assign permissions to team members which enables them to control who can do what with the information there.

It basically means more people within an artist’s orbit can help manage those important artist pages, which, particularly for emerging acts, may be the first actual information fresh fans see about the act they love.

[Also read: Apple Music to sponsor Super Bowl half time show for 5 years]

And better analytics

Apple has put all the analytic data on one page, which makes comparative analysis of what’s happening a lot easier. More from the MusicAlly report here.

The human touch and connectivity

These steps should help artists take more ownership of their Apple Music listing, hopefully enabling them to reach their fans a little more effectively. This really matters given the vast choice now available in music.

Apple Music recently announced that its service now offers up 100 million songs – pretty much the entire history of the world’s music.

The problem with this, of course, is that there’s a tendency for music fans to resolve around what they already know when faced with such extensive choice. Apple argues that this means “Human curation is more important than ever.”

Analyst Tatiana Cirisano at Midia Research today agreed with Apple’s approach.

“Despite the need for technology to help sift through the vast amount of music on streaming platforms, there is a case that human curation will become more important, not less,” she wrote.

We need guides

It’s necessary to give people credible guides to help protect them against the tyranny of choice. That’s particularly hard when humans have developed deep mistrust of faceless tech firms, corrupt and stupid governments, and a corrupt media.

“In an era characterised by passive listening, we need to enable deeper relationships with music, and social connection and identity are key to that equation,” she wrote.

Apple also recently introduced a Platoon for Artists app, which presumably will also give new musicians more control over their approach and use of Apple Music.

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