Bedroom DJ TraVice here- poorly tagged music files are a pet peeve of mine. I like 'em well-tagged for easy selection. Hopefully this post suggests the value of doing this with the example of a proper playlists creation from Atmospheric Drum & Bass Revival's downloads: This Facebook community is dedicated to the 'past, present and future of the atmospheric genre’s sound', as championed by its pioneers LTJ Bukem & DJ Fabio from the early 1990’s. Building on https://www.facebook.com/share/g/16JMzzdxzA, this group’s leadership launched a mix series to showcase its community’s  DJ mixing talent in 2023. At the time of writing, 20 mixes are available to stream off  Soundcloud  at https://soundcloud.com/atmosphericdrumandbass, with 13 offered for free downloaded (see example in Figure 1).

Figure 1. Atmospheric Drum & Bass Revival soundcloud download selection

In Apple Music a new playlist is simply created by pressing Apple and N at the same time. After downloading the mixes, they can be placed in a playlist by dragging them there from Songs, or simply right clicking on the mix and selecting <Add to playlist>, then choosing ’ Atmospheric Drum & Bass Revival’.

Figure 2. Atmospheric Drum & Bass Revival mixes playlist in Apple Music

While playlists can be ordered any number of ways for viewing via <Viewing Options>, I like to use the filenames to clearly indicate the order of release (01 - 013). They must also clearly indicate the series they are from through a consistently applied title (yes, the exact same one for readily displaying the entire series in searches). 

With all 13 mixes in the playlist (see Figure 2), it’s now time to improve the labelling of each mix. To improve on Figure 3’s example below, I must enter labels into DJ Illesta’s mix’s fields.

Figure 3. DJ Illesta Atmospheric Drum & Bass Revival 1 Apple Music info's starting point

There's much that can be added… artist, album, album artist composer, year, rating, bpm and comments. The extent of which depends on your interest(s). Likewise some labelling choices will be fairly subjective. Take genre for example, I use “drum and bass”, because most of this genre in my library defaults to the softer atmospheric style. However, aficionados of the hard jungle style may choose that to be their default. They may also prefer using DnB or drum & bass, while I use “drum and bass - hardstep” for grittier tracks and mixes.

It’s also important to appreciate that Apple Music’s labelling/tagging system is not designed around labelling DJ mix-sets. This is a meta-problem, since DJs are musicians whose medium is often a blend of other musical artists’ production and sounds. Apple Music’s labelling is understandably geared to the latter’s conventional works. It would struggle to cope with the meta-mentalness of a DJ doing a continuous remix of another DJs productions and remixes? For example, DJ Lenzman’s 2020 mix of DJ Redeyes' tracks.

With an academic hat on, this challenge suggests the multimodal difficulty of labelling  DJ’s music work via Apple Music (and iTunes) textual labels. Its indexing system caters to original artists versus producers, remixers and DJs. For example, there is no dedicated option for adding a DJs setlist. Instead one can appropriate <Comments> (for short set lists) or <Custom Lyrics> (for longer ones), see Figure 4. Since Atmospheric Drum & Bass Revival provides setlists for each mix, these are easy enough to copy-and-paste as “Custom Lyrics”.   

Figure 4.  DJ Illesta Atmospheric Drum & Bass Apple Music track listing in lyrics

Since there is no <DJ> identifier, I often add DJ before an artist's name. This makes it easier to select from DJs under the Artists view, depending on one’s mood… Also for a mix of one artist’s work by another DJ (such as Sasha’s “Voyage of Ima” remix of producer BT’s album), it seems apt to use  “Composer” to reflect the DJ’s role.

Figure 5 shows what the completed details page looks like- much better, of course!

Figure 5. DJ Illesta Atmospheric Drum & Bass Revival 1 Apple Music info complete + cover

Working to update the labels of many files is a schlep, so speed things up by creating a cut-and-paste file. This also helps ensure consistency across labelling. 

My txt file simply contained the:
Album title format
0# Atmospheric Drum & Bass Revival Mix Series - DJ
Album
0# Atmospheric Drum & Bass Revival Mix Series
Grouping
Atmospheric Drum & Bass Revival Mix Series
Date

2022 2023 2024 2025
Track
1

13

In each song, I set the track number to be 1 of 1 to reflect an entire DJ's mix. In contrast, the disc number follows the Atmospheric Drum & Bass Revival mix series' order, e.g. disc number of 1 and 13 to start. This seems apt in being similar to a podcasts' serialisation.

N.B. As you work to add information to each "song" please note that these updates do not automatically reflect in your Apple Music playlist’s display. So, click to another list, then return to yours to update its view.