Just wondering out here, cause Im really torn between these two. With Spotify family and Apple One I use both alternately and in both Im missing some parts that the other one have.
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for Apple Music I mostly lack good new songs suggestion algorithm, because it very often just plays me a song that I would never ever listen to - and that’s based on “continue playing” from current playlist.
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for Spotify I lack Losseless and Spatialise.
in terms of UI, both are somewhat not great
- Apple Music is cumbersome and hard to navigate to song that is currently playing.
- Spotify is just too much noise on the screen for me
What are your thoughts?
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I’ve used both Spotify premium (for 3 years) then switched to Apple Music to try it, keep it for a couple of months, back to Spotify premium, then finally back to Apple Music. In my opinion Spotify has better suggestions, but it may be because I used it for longer, but I hate the app and if your privacy conscious it’s a nightmare. Apple Music has a superior audio quality in the base plan, if you are on an Apple system it’s worth the price for its integration and at least your not selling your data to others as much as spotify. I think both web interfaces works really well anyway, if you don’t like the apps
Tidal. Better audio quality and revenue share than Spotify, plus no Joe Rogan.
I didn’t want to post it specifically unless someone else said it, but yes, Tidal. It has been great. Well working integration with Plex and Sonos, every song I’ve tried looking for they have, and they have a discount for military veterans.
Apple Music, but not for any reason. Just because I use Apple devices and I’ve never given it any thought.
As others have mentioned, I’ve not had an issue with the Apple recommendations, especially when it comes to “stations” - I think it does a good job of recommending similar artists, and I like it (but I’ve not used Spotify so don’t know if they’re better at it, or what better might look like).
Just a reminder, Apple’s Lossless tech doesn’t work over Bluetooth (that’s a Bluetooth limitation not an Apple limitation) so if for example your regular speakers are connected via Bluetooth then Apple’s Lossless isn’t a good reason to move services since you won’t experience it most the time anyway.
I would factor your primary device into your choice. I mostly control music via my iPhone, and the iOS music app is fine for that. Apple Music is… not ideal… on Mac, and if I used that as my primary controller I suspect I’d shop around for a better service. As an example of two baffling things that irritate me:
- Playlists are listed in a different order on Mac compared to iOS. There is no reason for this except that Apple is careless.
- Mac Apple Music sometimes throws a tantrum after e.g. a Zoom meeting and will refuse to produce any audio until you’ve closed and reopened the app. It does it with YouTube as well (e.g. you pause music to play a video, but when you unpause the music afterwards it won’t play). It’s erratic and has been reported elsewhere and is annoying.
Apple Music. The initial reason was that my own music was uploaded to be part of it. Along the way I’ve been using Spotify and many others. Today, I refuse to use Spotify. Why?
- They pay musicians an even more ridiculously low amount per stream than most other services.
- They have attempted to leech off the open podcast ecosystem to lure people into theirs and lock them there.
- They actively pay and host Joe Rogan’s lies and bullshit
Spotify Premium.
Spotify Connect alone is worth the choice between the two services, in my opinion.
Besides, Spotify doesn’t require you to update your OS in order to update the app.
Spotify Connect is the “killer app” for me as I have a couple of amplifiers with the inbuilt connect client. That being said I use plex-amp to listen to all of my ripped CDs (being collecting since buying Brothers in Arms as my first CD when it was originally released), which is Spotify like for music on the go, and it’s loss-less (then I use Bluetooth headphones :-( )
Spotify just because I’ve been using it almost since it came out and especially because Apple Music is absolute chaos for scrobbling to last.fm
last.fm! That’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time.
There are dozens of us still using it! I don’t quite get how they haven’t shut down yet but I’m not complaining, I get to have a music listening history database across streaming platforms and mediums, just for that feature I find it so incredibly useful.
Maybe I should dust off my account.
Same with ListenBrainz. I actually coded a manual scrobbling plugin for MusicBrainz Picard to handle things like this. Should get that through to the MusicBrainz guys.
For last.fm there are apps on Mac that do the job, on Windows with the AM Preview I found AMWin-RP which is mainly a Discord rich presence handler but also does last.fm too.
Currently Spotify. Would like to change to stop supporting them (they don’t prioritize development in Apple ecosystem, e.g. HomePod support, audio quality could improve, supporting of podcasters I wish to not support, etc.), BUT my other half enjoys Dax Shepard’s podcast too much.
Fuck you, Dax, for going exclusive on the same platform as Joe Rogan.
Damn I didn’t realize he went exclusive to Spotify. I listen to his podcast but very much on my own time and have like 50+ episodes in my queue I want to listen to someday so didn’t notice.
I tend to really only stay up to date with Conan, Smartless and sports pods
I use Spotify simply because my FiL had an extra spot on the family plan. If that weren’t the case, I’d probably be trying one of the Apple bundles. I’m actually quite happy with Spotify, but I’m curious what Apple Music’s native integration would feel like.
Spotify. I’ve been using them for years. I see no reason to switch to another service and start all over again
I’m a producer and have a slightly different relationship with these platforms than the average consumer.
Apple Music SUCKS promoting my music and gets way less listeners than Spotify by a lot. The comparison is not even close.
The lack of reach with Apple Music when I go look at my metrics compared to Spotify is really sad. So for that reason alone I choose Spotify over all of the other platforms.
Spotify. I’m on a duo plan at $13/mo which is my ideal price point versus need. Apple Music only has individual or family plans, and the family plan is $17/mo.
I like Spotify’s recommendations and the overall style of its app. That being said, I’m sure Apple Music is much better for privacy-oriented folks, given how much data Spotify seems to collect.
I use Apple One family premier:
https://www.apple.com/apple-one/
Having lots of iCloud storage is handy, and I use the other services.
Also, unless things have changed, Apple pays artists more than Spotify.
Sure, but when I am only looking to pay for myself and one other person, and music is the only thing I want out of this arrangement, there’s only one best deal right now and that’s Spotify.
That being said, Apple TV+ is an enticing offer right now with season 2 of Foundation starting this week. But my usual streaming service strategy is to just wait for a show to finish, buy a month subscription, and watch the whole thing over a weekend.
Apple Music. I have a very large library and am an album listener. AM is much better at library organization for me.
For me, the dealbreaker with Apple Music is that they nuke your library a few months after you canceled your subscription. I tried it back in the day when it was new and used it happily for some time, but the difficulty of finding new tracks that I like drove me back to Spotify. I then wanted to give AM another try recently, only to find out that my old library was empty. I immediately canceled the AM trial after that…
Also I found that Spotify has a greater pool of niche stuff that I listen to.
The other reasons why I prefer Spotify have already been mentioned:
- better discoverability of new music
- better cross platform support (I use both Mac and Windows)
I like Apple Music. I don’t listen to a lot of music, and it just works for me. I have several HomePod minis and it just works. Also, being able to ask Siri to play something while I’m in the car is very important to me.
Kind of in the same boat right now. I’m using Apple Music right now for the following:
- Lossless should be the base level at this point, not a premium.
- The library management in Apple Music is way superior to Spotify, especially for uploading local files. Going to upload some Bandcamp stuff to my Apple Music library in the future.
- I have an issue on Spotify for Android where my 10k+ liked songs list slows to a crawl. This doesn’t happen to Apple Music. Yeah, it’s choppy when scrolling but I’d rather that than Spotify taking seconds to load the list.
Though it’s not perfect…
- there’s no Linux client at all, and though Cider is a great effort there’s some things that I miss using it (gapless playback is one, it’s essential for album listeners like myself) so I’m having to install a Windows VM to run Apple Music.
- There’s some weird gaps in some artists’ libraries. I listen to quite a bit of Kaskade, and I find it weird that some of his music isn’t on Apple Music in the UK even though it is on Spotify.
- Scrobbling is an issue. I actually coded a manual scrobbler plugin for MusicBrainz Picard to deal with this.
