Apple Music Took Away the Stars. Now What?

 

A couple years ago, Apple iTunes let you give each song a star rating of 1-5 stars. It was great and powerful, and it let me use “smart playlists” to create a tiered system for my music.

Then iOS 10 came along and took away the star ratings.  They might have also taken away smart playlists too.  I don’t know.  I had uninstalled iTunes on my computer.

Now the only way to rate a song is with “Like” or “Dislike.”  It’s ridiculous.  If I dislike a song, why would I have it on my phone?  I would delete the sucker.  Of course I like every song.

So here’s the solution I came up with.

Apple simplified their Music app.  Now you have to simplify your music system.

What I did was create a new playlist called “My Music.”  I dumped every song on my phone into that playlist.  Without stars, there is effectively only one level of music.  So I treat it that way.

I shuffle through the playlist and listen to groups of three songs. Out of the three songs, I will delete my least favorite one from my phone.  I’ll do this until I reach 24 total hours of music, or about 300 songs (I buy a new album every month).

Maybe I’ll cut it back even further.  I’m thinking of keeping only my favorite 100 or 200 songs on my phone.  I don’t know.  Minimalism.  Or something like that.