Eight months after posting a detailed summary of the "clunky" behind-the-scenes process musicians have to go through when using Apple Music Connect, Dave Wiskus decided to revisit his stance on the platform to see if Apple had made any notable changes to its grasps at socially connecting artists and fans. Wiskus -- an app developer and lead singer for the band Airplane Mode -- admitted in the blog post that he feels less "connected" to the musical world and thinks the actual social aspects of the experience have failed "miserably."
Similar to his post from July, Wiskus expounded on Connect's basic inability to function as a normal social network: it lacks a follow button on artist pages, a metric for how many followers a band has, and individual profile pages for a more engaged community, among other things.
One of his most interesting points detailed a blunder with Connect's support, centering around the fact that an artist with a similar name managed to change the profile picture on Airplane Mode's page. After weeks of back-and-forth with Apple Music Connect support, eventually the band discovered that Apple's solution was creating an entirely new profile for Airplane Mode and abandoning the one with the wrong picture.
Rather than swap out images, the Connect support folks created a new profile for us with the correct photo (which we still can’t change, by the way). The frustration would end here if not for one little side-effect: we lost all of our posts and all of our followers.
Worse yet, those posts and followers are still attached to a now-unmanned “Airplane Mode” profile, so not only do we not have any way of telling our fans to follow the new profile, they have no way of even knowing that we relocated. Anyone who was following us can now assume that we’ve just stopped making new things. How many followers did we lose? No idea. How do we get them back? We can’t.
Wiskus notes that, despite all of his frustrations, "Apple is in a unique position to unify and democratize the music business" thanks to Connect's ability to integrate music sharing with social interaction, if the company decided to commit to bolstering both sides of that equation, that is. As it currently stands the artist isn't sure who Connect is for, and doesn't see much of a future for the platform if Apple continues to do nothing. "Seven months later—from a company the size of Apple—this isn’t just unacceptable, it’s pathetic."
Read all of the thoughts that Wiskus has on Apple Music Connect on his blog Better Elevation.
