I live in a place where people are officially trilingual. French, German and Luxembourgish are all official languages of the country and a very large number of the population speaks all three, in addition to English. I am multi-lingual as well.
I have been an Apple Music subscriber since the beginning. My main criticism on the service is that the music recommendations are generally not good for my music taste. I’m not basing my judgement solely on it not hitting the right rythm or melodies, but also on failing to target the correct language.
Nowadays, there are too many aspects of our digital life that are curated by dumb algorithms. In a welcome departure from the norm, Apple has been pretty public in promoting the human element of their recommendations. I’m a strong supporter of that idea. Yet, in this instance, I think that some poorly designed algorithm, or one with insufficient training data, is playing a central role in messing with my listening experience.
I mainly listen to music with lyrics sung in English but I occasionally tune into Greek and French songs. A while back I noticed that creating a radio station out of a Greek song sometimes results in a playlist composed of Russian, Turkish, German and Dutch songs. Today, I was browsing my New Music mix on Apple Music and it had songs in languages I don’t want to listen to.
I wish there was a setting/preference that restricted the languages that would play on our profile. For this to ever work, songs would need to know which language(s) their lyrics are written in. I find it alarming that when browsing Greek songs, I can’t actually see that there’s any indication that the language is Greek. I can also not understand why the songs are presented only in latin characters.
I admit that this is just empirical evidence but it strongly suggests poor language support in Apple’s music service. That’s a shame. I don’t think there’s any doubt that most people like to listen to songs in languages they understand.
