Did you ever notice that Apple Music doesn’t really have a web player? Spotify and many other services offer this feature, but Apple Music hasn’t seemed to join in. With this in mind, some students at the University of Kent recognized that. In fact, the unofficial Apple Music web player they created has been attracting over 200,000 users.
The service is called Musish. Having launched 5 months ago, the site carefully states it is not directly affiliated with Apple from the home screen. Rest assured while requiring your Apple ID, the web-based player doesn’t use any of your personal information. Developer Brychan Bennett-Odlum spoke with Cult of Mac regarding the security of the web-based player:
“When a user clicks our ‘Connect to Apple Music’ or ‘login’ buttons we open a new browser window under the Apple.com domain. We do not have any access to this window. After a user logs in to Apple.com, they will be prompted with an access request to allow Musish to access Apple Music, media library, and listening activity for their account.
“Apple then sends the Musish webapp a token which we send back to Apple in subsequent requests which they use to identify the user and return us data / perform an action (such as playing a song, or adding an album to their library). This token is only valid for the scope of Apple Music, and not other services they provide. It’s also only valid for a limited time. On top of this, we make sure to never even send the user’s token to any server we host.”
Musish Looks and Feels like Apple Music
In closing, the interface is clean. It legitimately looks like Apple Music. The web-based player can access songs you have already purchased, as well as playlists. Although this isn’t the first web-based player to pop up such as the now-defunct playapplemusic.com, it seems the most successful. The radio feature still needs work, but the site is completely open source. The site was created using the official public Apple Music APIs, and the official MusicKit JS library. Perhaps this is a site that could be worth investing in for Apple Music to gain as many subscribers as Spotify.
