Restoring Music.app to the iTunes glory days

If you're trying to move away from Spotify, Apple Music might not look compelling when you first open it up on your computer. It's hard to evaluate fairly when you've been steeped in Spotify and have developed learned helplessness from its lack of customization. But Apple Music is more under your control.

Your method of listening to music subconsciously shapes how you think about music's place in your life. This is true whether you listen only to vinyl or only via an app. When using an app, Default UIs are optimized for some Frankensteined "average user", not you! So, let's customize Apple Music's interface to make some conscious choices.

I'll run through a few customizations that make it work for me. Take the parts that inspire you, leave the ones that don't. It's personal. These all work regardless of whether your songs come from Apple Music's streaming library or from your own mp3s.

Library view setup

Unlike Spotify, Apple Music's table columns are customizable and moveable.

The default songs UI:

After my tweaks:

The columns can be reordered by dragging. Most columns can be toggled via the right-click menu on the column headings. Weirdly, the Album artwork column, the left-most in the screenshot above, is enabled elsewhere. It took me months before I stumbled onto it 💀. I sort by this column most of the time, as I like how it sorts first by Artist Name and then by albums chronologically.

To enable the artwork column, click this mysterious icon at the top-right of the app. It's like a junk drawer of functionality that Apple didn't bother to find a real home for:

Click "Show View Options" in this menu. Then enable the "Show Artwork" checkbox in the popup menu:

Correcting the Playlist view

Another confounding UI choice is how the default playlist view looks similar to but is functionally different from the overall library table.

The default playlist view looks like:

Thankfully there's an (unintuitive) option to change this by clicking "View > as Songs" in the app's menu bar:

The playlist will now have the same look and functionality as the main library:

Playlisting

Spotify Wrapped presents itself as a backbreaking gift that this $90 billion company made just for you. In reality they are just dressing up very basic information that they deliberately withhold from you for the other 364 days of the year. Coincidentally, it's also the only time of year where they make you a playlist of only songs you already know, without any sprinkles of new music the company wants you to hear.

Music.app lets you use this information however you want. Want to know what you've listened to the most? Sort by the Play Count column to see for yourself! You can also create "Smart Playlists" which are filters of your music library, meaning you can:

• Make a smart playlist of songs you've added this year. If you want, sort it by Play Count to make your own constantly-updating Wrapped-like playlist.
• Make a smart playlist of songs you haven't listened to in the last 5 years. Sort by Artist and hit play. It can be exciting to reconnect with a song you had forgotten about!
• Make a smart playlist of music released during specific years. Target 1975-1980 to hear your disco songs. Target your high school years to relive your angst. Etcetera.

Create a smart playlist by selecting File > New > Smart Playlist in the app's menu bar. Some more example filters:

Why this matters to me

Apps that aren't customizable, like Spotify, impart their corporate mental model onto you. I find this especially dangerous for apps managing something as central to your identity as music. Uncustomizable platforms use their total control to induce user behaviors that are profitable to them. When it comes to art and entertainment, corporate motives are always at odds with your personal human values.

Spotify's music library management UI is purposefully limited. If it wasn't, you likely would spend more time forming deeper bonds with music you already cherish. Checking out new music would be an intentional active choice for you rather than a passive constant of your life. But they want you locked into their platform by algorithmic dependence.

My decade as a software engineer has shown me how every large-scale app has been optimized against you for profit. The technology you use affects your behavior! So make choices deliberately based on how you want your brain to work. Don't expect any App to be ready-to-use out of the box. Instead, view it as a Tool to use and abuse for your individual needs. There is no One Way to do things. You can make a tiny assertion of your human autonomy by counteracting the default patterns an app tries to funnel you into.

- zgzag

p.s. here is a playlist of my songs on repeat so far in 2026