In our day and age, when every person with a keyboard and an internet connection can lift up or take down a business, companies must be present on social media, and properly address customers complaints. Apple’s recent changes to its music service, following customers complaints, not only led to an improvement of its product, but also gained the company some happy, loyal customers.

A year after Apple Inc. launch of its Apple Music service, the company has fixed one of its long standing issues which prompted many complaints from users. Users had been finding songs in their iTunes libraries replaced with other versions. Now, Apple Music subscribers will receive the iTunes Match audio fingerprint update, to resolve such issues.  

iTunes Match in its previous version used less accurate metadata to match songs between users’ existing iTunes libraries and their Apple Music accounts. As a result, users could end up with having the specific versions of some songs replaced by other similar songs, such as a live recording from a concert replaced by a studio version and vise versa. The new iTunes Match uses more accurate metadata, and should, in theory, eliminate this issue.

This update will also mean that Apple will stop applying DRM (digital rights management) to users’ personal music libraries. DRM restricts what you can do with files you own, and Apple applied them to all music files downloaded from the iCloud, even if the file was only a copy of one that you downloaded because you accidentally deleted the DRM-free original file.

Apple has given us a great example of good customer service. Although it took the company a while to fixing the issue, it showed its customers that it pays to be a loyal customer. Ultimately, if Apple wants to continue to compete against Spotify and other music streaming services, the company will need to keep customers loyal, by fixing bugs and issues like this in the future.

It would have been easy enough for Apple to close its ears to customer complaints, seeing as how the company has seen so much growth since its release. But, a successful company, such as Apple Inc., understands the importance of listening to customers complaints in order to gain customer loyalty, which will ultimately result in a higher subscriber count, meaning more revenue for the company.