Apple Music Connect

» see music.apple.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Apple Music Connect's peak years overlap with my engineering work years, but i was a spotify holdout through the entire window and never lived inside Apple Music's app long enough to find the Connect tab on purpose. The few times i opened Apple Music on someone else's iphone in the 2016-2017 window, Connect was already the dead tab you scrolled past on the way to the library. By the time apple removed it in december 2018 the feature had been quietly invisible for so long that the announcement read more like a cleanup notice than a shutdown.

Connect launched on June 30 2015 as one of the four tabs inside the new Apple Music app, alongside For You, New, and Radio. The pitch from the Beats team was that streaming services were good at catalogs but bad at the direct artist-to-fan relationship MySpace had once owned. Connect was supposed to be the place where any artist with an Apple Music for Artists account could post raw studio audio, behind-the-scenes photos, lyric drafts, and short videos that did not belong on instagram or twitter. The artist pages would aggregate this material into a feed that fans could follow inside the app.

the launch problem was immediate: artists already had instagram, twitter, and youtube, and their teams had spent five years tuning posting workflows for those platforms. asking them to post a fifth version of the same content to a tab inside a music app, with no clear audience metric and no way to cross-post, did not survive the first quarterly review at any label. by late 2015 reviewers had already started noting that most artist Connect pages contained one welcome post from June and nothing else.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was ~

the Connect tab in the iOS Apple Music app showed a vertical feed of posts from artists you followed. Each post could carry a photo, a short video clip, an audio attachment, or a text update with a song link. Fans could like or comment, and could share an individual post out to Messages or Mail. Apple briefly produced original Connect content for the platform, including a 2016 reality docuseries with DJ Khaled called "We the Best TV" that streamed inside the tab. None of it built a sustained audience.

~ the unraveling ~

by iOS 10 in 2016, the Connect tab had been demoted off the main app bar. Apple folded its function into the For You feed instead, which let the company quietly stop featuring Connect posts without removing the feature outright. The Connect URL paths kept resolving but the tab was no longer where most users looked. From that point the feature was on the slow-removal track that apple uses when a launch tentpole did not work and the company does not want to call it a failure in writing.

~ the funny part ~

apple announced the removal on december 13 2018 via a support document rather than a press release. The replacement was described as "the ability for users to share their music and playlists with friends and followers introduced in iOS 11", which had been live for over a year by the time Connect was officially deprecated. The Connect tab was already gone from the app by then for most users. The december notice was the paperwork closing out a feature that had been functionally dead since 2016 and that few users had noticed leaving.

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