Release Types Now Organized Differently in Apple Music ⇥ macstories.net

A promising update on an issue surfaced earlier this year. Federico Viticci, MacStories:

While the old artist page design of Apple Music mixed albums, singles, EPs, live albums, and more under the same ‘Albums’ section, the new Apple Music features separate sections for different types of music releases. The new sections include singles and EPs, live albums, essential albums recommended by Apple Music editors, compilations, and appearances by an artist on other albums. As pictured above, Apple Music now also highlights an artist’s latest or upcoming release at the top of the page.

Separation between albums and other releases isn’t a new idea. Beats Music, the streaming service Apple acquired in 2014 and subsequently relaunched as Apple Music in 2015, featured separate views for albums, EPs, and compilations. Three years after its relaunch, it appears Apple has implemented most of Beats Music’s organization of artist releases, which was arguably one of the original service’s most useful and innovative functionalities.

There’s an interesting little side story regarding this news and the last three Nine Inch Nails releases. All three are about half an hour long but, while the first two are classified as EPs — as you might expect for five-track sets — the most recent, released in June, is listed as an LP. The reason for that, according to NIN frontman Trent Reznor, is because streaming services treat EPs as “lesser” albums. Beats Music, which Reznor was heavily involved in the design of, used to do that, but Apple Music didn’t until just recently.

And, strangely, all three recent NIN releases are classified as “Albums” in Apple Music; in Spotify, the two EPs are buried as “Singles”.

EPs are often just as important to an artist’s repertoire as LPs. While I think separating them can be beneficial from a categorization perspective, I would hate to see an artist’s recent release buried just because it’s listed as an EP.

Viticci:

I’d still like to see better grouping options for different editions of the same album: while Beats Music used to group explicit, remastered, and re-issued albums under a single sub-section, these versions aren’t grouped by Apple Music yet.

While we’re at it, I would love to be able to hide clean releases across Apple Music, and have Siri default to the explicit — read: canonical — version of any request.