I purchase music outright because I'm old. I often buy from what at least used to be called the iTunes Music Store. The biggest advantage for me for doing so over, say, buying from Amazon or directly from the artist's site (which I often do, or buy from Bandcamp if available), is that Apple Music will stream those songs for me even if I didn't download them locally, so they're accessible any time I have an Apple device (or Windows!) and a network connection.

Well, almost. It doesn't work from my HomePod, you know, the device I spent a few hundred bucks on TO PLAY MUSIC.

All these phrases except maybe one used to work at some point. It used to be I could use the magic phrase "from my library" and get things to work, or say the name of a specific album. No longer!

And "shuffle my library" used to always work even when nothing else did. I'd sometimes get shuffle even when asking for something specific -- and Siri would tell me so before ignoring what I'd really requested ("Now playing your music library shuffled"). That shuffling the full library worked always drove me crazy because it'd tell me the music was there, Siri just wasn't going to play the way I wanted it.

Anyhow, the main course (Warning: this may say "Hey Siri" several times and light up as many Apple devices as you have within listening range):

Transcript:

Me: Hey Siri, play The Warning from my library.

Siri: The Warning Now Playing.

Also Siri: Sorry, there was a problem with Apple Music.

Me: Hey Siri, play Keep Me Fed.

Siri: Now playing Escapism by The Warning.

Me, silently: [Escapism? Isn't that the sixth song on the...]

Also Siri: Sorry, there was a problem with Apple Music.

Me: Hey Siri, play The Rolling Stones.

Siri: Here's The Rolling Stones.

Also Siri: Sorry, there was a problem with Apple Music.

Me: Hey Siri, shuffle songs from my... library.

Siri: Playing all songs, shuffled.

LONG PAUSE

Siri: Sorry, there was a problem with Apple Music.

I think that's a clear QA fail. Shouldn't these be well-established "user stories" by now? If they worked before, someone made it work. Did they do that on their own time or were they asked to? What happened to those tests? Why aren't those scenarios tested any more?

Like, I get it. I'm a dinosaur in a way that hasn't become cool again. I'm reminded of this Twitter ad I saw from the RIAA (boo! hiss!) last week (Oct 23rd):

I AM the 2%! There's are dozens of us...

Still, I think back to that picture of Jobs with the Tiffany lamp and hifi. Today's Apple seems to have completely lost the thread of Steve Jobs' "Thoughts on Music".

It continues. On Apple's HomePod feedback page, the most recent HomePod OS version you can select is 16.5. Mine, after searching the Home app for a while, is apparently on 17.6 and is downloading 18 now. How much money does this company have again?

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