Siri Won’t Answer Music Questions Unless You Subscribe to Apple Music

As of a week ago, it had been reported that Apple Music has signed up over 15 million users. It will be interesting to see how many become paying customers as time goes by but if just 5% begin paying, which I think is a fairly low conversion rate, Apple will still be raking in some big money. That 5% would be around 750,000 strong and for $9.99 a month its comes out to around $7.5 million a month in revenue that Apple can pile onto its ever growing heap of cash.

So what is that $7.5 million a month going to be used for? Of course Apple won’t make that public knowledge but one thing we can assume is that some money is going towards Siri development to help her understand whether you are subscribed to Apple Music and what music questions she’s allowed to answer.

According to The Verge, Siri won’t answer some music-related questions if you are not a subscriber to Apple Music. Since I let my Apple Music trial subscription lapse I thought I would put Siri to the test and sure enough she let me know she couldn’t answer my question because I was not subscribed to Apple Music.

This strange behavior seems to only be triggered by questions about music charts that are worded in a certain way. The question I asked was about the most popular song in 2012. What’s odd is that if the question is just slightly worded different to say the best song in 2012, Siri will perform a web search instead of refusing to help.

I assume the Apple engineer charged with making Siri uncooperative to non Apple Music subscribers just hasn’t got around to all of the different variations of questions that may be asked about music. This discovery seems to suggest that Apple is pulling out everything it can think up to get people paying for the Apple Music service.

Now if you are already a subscriber to Apple Music, Siri does have a few tricks that are helpful. Not only can you ask Siri about information from music charts, you can ask Siri to play the top song from any given year. You can even ask Siri to play top music from a particular year and she will play the 25 top ranking songs of that year.

You can also tell Siri that you want to listen to more like the current song playing and she will add 50 similar songs to your queue to be played next. If there is a cover available of a song you like, you can ask Siri to play the cover as long as you know the cover band name.

My favorite Siri feature for Apple Music is the ability to tell Siri to play any song in the Apple Music catalog on demand. It may be simple, but it’s an incredibly powerful thing to be able to have the world’s music, not just available at your fingertips, but at your word. And of course Apple made sure to include the ability to simply say, “Siri, play Beats 1”.

Siri is becoming a more and more powerful tool everyday but if you plan to rely on Siri for music information it looks likes you’ll half to pony up that $9.99 a month for an Apple Music subscription.