“Hey Siri, what’s top of the charts at the moment?” Unless you pay for Apple Music, Siri is keeping mum on the subject, leaving you actually typing into Google like we’re stuck in the Dark Ages.

This is what happens if you ask Siri a question about the charts without an Apple Music subscription, as spotted by Pandora’s co-creator Tom Conrad:
A somewhat heavy-handed marketing tactic. Does anyone really value the convenience of chatting music with Siri as worth £9.99 per month? The real kicker is that, if anyone does pay Siri’s ransom note, the personal assistant still doesn’t seem to know the answer:
It smacks as a little desperate, to be honest: a style that really doesn’t suit most expensive flagship smartphones around. If you’re going to beg for extra money, you’d better be damned sure it’s a feature that’s genuinely worth it. This reminds me of the dark days when Microsoft didn’t allow people to use free services Twitter and Facebook on Xbox 360 unless they forked out for a Xbox Live Gold account.
We know that music charts are part of Apple Music, of course, but if it can’t find the information in there, Siri typically provides a web search with some answers instead. Either this is a very strange bug, or it’s an unusually desperate bit of advertising that suggests Apple Music is far from doing as well as the company would hope.
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Image: Karlis Dambrans used under Creative Commons
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