This week, I look at how streaming music services are changing things for me, what’s going on with Microsoft and its Windows Phone, Internet outages of the day, and an update from the world of robots.

Apple Music has changed the way I listen to tunes

Apple Music launched in Canada last week. And after I updated iTunes and was able to use the service, I was floored at the music I was listening to.

I selected the “Mixtape” playlist and heard Madness, The Cure, early INXS, The La’s, Jane’s Addiction, and Blondie. All in one session without me having to do anything. When “Come on Eileen” was followed by “Smells Like Teen Spirit” I was done wondering if Apple Music was going to be worth my time.

It’s like having my formative, growing up years fed right back to me in one endless playlist.

Now i know that there are other music streaming options out there, including Spotify, the biggest player thus far. But until now I’ve never considered any of those options seriously because I have a good library of music and it’s all in iTunes. With Apple Music I can have all the music in iTunes. it’s easy for me, and that’s one of the things that makes Apple’s solutions so appealing to people.

It’s easy.

And using voice commands on your iPhone, iPod, or iPad, it’s even easier. You can tell Siri to play the top song from a particular year, for example. Like and skip songs with a simple word, and Siri makes a note in your music preferences.

In addition to Spotify, there are other players in the music streaming and subscription space, including Google Play Music, Spotify, and Tidal. Xbox Music just changed its name to Groove (for Microsoft, the Xbox brand is reserved for gaming).

And Rdio announced this week that it is adding curated stations to its programming lineup. Record labels (including Canadian companies Arts & Crafts and MapleMusic) and “influencers” (Exclaim! magazine and Consequence of Sound).

If I’ve got a complaint about Apple Music it’s that the service bogs down an already problematic iTunes app. That’s a bigger issue that I suspect Apple is already working on. They’d better come up with a fix fast, though.

But my early experience with Apple Music reminded me of something that I’ve been missing from music for more than 10 years: discoverability. When I’m only listening to the music I’ve collected, I’ll never know what else is coming out.

That’s how we end up like our parents, listening to the same old music for the rest of our lives.

Apple Music will cost $10 a month, or $15 a month for a family plan, which covers up to 6 people.

What’s up with the Windows Phone?

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella gave employees a heads-up today that some 7,800 people in the phone division will be getting cut in the coming months. Along with that, the company is taking an “impairment charge” of about US$7.6 billion related to its acquisition of Nokia.

Despite all this, in the email to staff Nadella wrote: “I am committed to our first-party devices including phones. However, we need to focus our phone efforts in the near term while driving reinvention. We are moving from a strategy to grow a standalone phone business to a strategy to grow and create a vibrant Windows ecosystem that includes our first-party device family.”

That sounds to me like he still wants Microsoft to have a hand in the hardware. What that will look like is unclear.

Trading halted at New York Stock Exchange

Yesterday, hacker group anonymous tweeted, Wonder if tomorrow is going to be bad for Wall Street…. we can only hope.

Today, the New York Stock Exchange suspended trading for about three hours. “The issue we are experiencing is an internal technical issue and is not the result of a cyber breach,” the organization tweeted.

The FBI also claimed there was no indication of a cyber breach or a cyber attack.

Of course they would say that.

This week in robots

Last week, a technician installing a robot at a Volkswagen plant in Germany was killed by the robot when it struck him and held him against a metal plate, according to the Financial Times.

It’s an unfortunate incident, and would have been largely ignored by the rest of the world were it not for a Tweet about the story by a FT correspondent.

The journalist’s surname isn’t “Connor” as in the Terminator movies, but “O’Connor”. That fact made no difference at all.

Not long after she reminded Twitter that someone had died.

A few weeks earlier, the DARPA Robotics Challenge finals took place in Los Angeles. Twenty-three teams manoeuvred robots through obstacle courses that were designed like disaster scenarios.

The robots moved slowly, and sometimes not at all, and many of them fell over. (There’s a great round-up of animated GIFs at Motherboard showing these robot fails that will have you laughing out loud.)

The point? Making robots is hard. The world of Terminator and Short Circuit is well off.

Until then, let’s revel in the fact that there is going to be a battle between two giant robots.

“We have a giant robot. You have a giant robot. You know what needs to happen.”