It may seem petty to be overly annoyed by the Apple Music ad in the upper left corner of Music.app in Monterey. I say ad because I’m not a Apple Music¹ user, and it looks like there is no way to disable it. Let me know if I overlooked something, but I can’t find a way to get rid of it. When you first open the new Music.app preferences, it mentions that some stuff was moved to the “Screen Time” prefpane under “Content & Privacy” (the entire prefpane is just horrible, almost Windows preferences levels of chaos), but nothing about Apple Music is to be found there.

I’m even willing to give them the benefit of the doubt – maybe it’s a bug, maybe it was simply forgotten. I honestly don’t care anymore, it makes no practical difference if this particular instance is actually a forced shit experience to push their services down my throat or “just another bug” or carelessness. I’m tired. Tired of all the bugs, and tired of all the shit experiences for anyone not willing to pay a monthly fee. Not that the experience is much better if you do pay, as documented way too often in previous posts.

This decline in software quality and user experience has now gone on for so long that we’ve almost grown numb to it. When I complained about this to Philipp privately, his initial reaction was “Just subscribe and be happy”, and he was only partly joking. I have the same reaction to similar things sometimes, most recently when a friend shared his multiple day horror story of trying to get a Minecraft account unbanned after it was (probably, because usually you can only guess what the algorithm has decided today) flagged for the heinous act of not having a phone number in the connected Microsoft account. “Just add the damn phone number” I thought, because I have personally long given up the fight to not have to share my phone number with everything I use. He was of course right how utterly unacceptable his experience was, not even being given a way to contact support after being locked out of something he paid for. But we’re all so damn tired that sometimes it feels better to “just give in” and stop fighting.