Spotify vs Apple Music

With the recent Spotify Family/Google Home offer, I wondered what people’s thoughts were on the 2 music services.

A huge amount of people I’ve spoken to in the past prefer Spotify because…

• They had it already before Apple Music came out.
• They have devices that may not work with Apple Music.

I’ve had Apple Music for the past couple of years, and have found it OK - I’m not a huge listener of music, and it tends to be on when I’m in the car, walking the dog or something else.

I’ve always found the Apple Music UI to be a bit… meh. It was never particularly intuitive, and always seemed a little half baked.

The only reason I was drawn to AM is because I’ve got Apple everything else (although I don’t have a HomePod).

The argument for AM seems to be:

• Higher quality music (although, I don’t believe anyone can truly hear the difference).
• A few more “exclusives”, which don’t really appeal to me massively.

What do you use?

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spotify all the way

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We have a Spotify subscription in our household that my partner pays for, and we have a YouTube Music/Google Play Music/YouTube Premium that I pay for.

If we needed to cancel one, I’d cancel the Spotify one, and she’d cancel the Google one. Which is how we ended up paying for both :joy:

I think the Google product has the best value, since you get additional perks of both the music service as well as ad-free YouTube.

But weighing each music service on their own merits, I think Spotify is the more advanced service. Which it should be, since that’s literally their product, which isn’t true of either Apple or Google - neither company would be hugely different without a streaming music service, as it’s not their bread and butter.

Where GPM and YouTube Music shine for me is simply the availability of rare/obscure stuff that simply isn’t available under blanket major label licensing databases. GPM lets you upload your own stuff to the catalog, and YouTube Music allows you to stream just the audio of stuff people have uploaded themselves to YouTube. For example, any heavily bootlegged artist, like Prince, Tupac, etc, you’ll find huge amounts of their unreleased music/alternate takes/live shows on YouTube, and with a YouTube Music subscription you can stream it just as easily to any audio devices like Google Home just like anything else. The ethical ramifications of that is a different argument, but the fact is, the stuff is there.

This is admittedly a problem that only exists for huge music fans. For the average person, I think Spotify is probably the catch-all mass market product that provides most of their needs. And their recommendation engine is incredibly good.

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I use Spotify, I’ve dabbled with AM but never really felt like it worked as well as Spotify did, far less intuitive features and just seemed to have only one thing going for it being having all your music in the “music” app.

I have a family account with all 6 used up so its only like £2.50 a month for me.

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Spotify is the best music streaming service available, both in terms of sound quality and user interface. That said, I use Google Play Music/YouTube Premium (family plan) as I am deeply entrenched in the Google ecosystem and I like the YouTube benefits too.

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I want to like Apple Music since i’m fully invested in Apple’s ecosystem but you can’t beat Spotify’s music recommendations, plus there’s some challenging UI/UX aspects to the  Music app. That and iTunes is fully trash but hopefully that’ll change at WWDC 19.

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The amount of times YouTube advertises this to me is unreal! I’d be tempted to pay just to get rid of it! :joy:

I think that sums it up well - I guess I’m looking for someone who opted for Apple Music and what their reasons were behind it!

Conscious that I don’t want to get into the technicalities of bit rates and music quality :joy:, but my understanding is that Tidal offers the best quality, followed by Apple and then Spotify “technically” offers the worst - Although like I said, I don’t think anyone could tell the difference in a blind test.

I think we’ve been waiting for this for about 5 years! :joy:

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I use Apple Music and honestly it’s only because of the design. I have never liked the way Spotify looks and just can’t get past it.

It makes me a little conflicted as I know I’d be getting some better features/recommendations etc on Spotify, but I just think it looks gross :man_shrugging:

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Spotify all the way! Shall we create a Spotify “Monzo Community Playlist”?

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AM for me. Tried Spotify a few times and didn’t find it easy to just let me play a particular album (which I love to do), instead it’s all playlists and what others are listening to. Prefer Apples UI as well

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I thought Spotify was 320kbps compared to Apple’s 256kbps?

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Personally I use Apple Music but that’s just because I have an Apple HomePod, otherwise I prefer the darkmode theme that Spotify uses and the ability to share playlists easier with friends :musical_note:

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So, I’m going to sound like a right audiophile here, despite having no idea what I’m saying…

Adding to this, audio experts put 256kpbs ACC marginally better in quality on paper., but indiscernible from a human ear’s perspective. The real gains are file size: 256kpbs AAC is on-average, 15-25% smaller size per file, compared to 320kbps MP3 (directly due to compression algorithm differences.) For someone who has a large library & all DL’ed offline (as I do), this really adds up in saved space.

This may be of interest to you…

https://www.reddit.com/r/AppleMusic/comments/9iz36n/apple_music_vs_spotify_premium_sound_quality_only/

Well, there ain’t no party like an S Club Party… right? :wink:

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Like they could’ve done at WWDC 18, or 17, or 16…

:joy::joy:

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That’s made for some wonderful road trips in the past :heart_eyes:

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I’m very much in the apple eco-system, but I refuse to use Apple Music. I find the user interface to be clunky & hard to navigate. I love the spotify live exclusives, instant streaming to the majority of my devices plus collaborative playlists (which I know is a feature on AM but nobody I know uses Apple Music)

I use Apple Music, and like it - I don’t find any usability problems/UI issues.
I have never used Spotify though, so don’t have that experience to compare it to.

I’ve both Apple Music and Spotify. While I pay for Apple Music, I am part of Spotify family plan. I’m using Apple Music mostly for playing music through my HomePod. I’d use it more if the playlists were as good as Spotify’s. Spotify has a lot of good custom curated playlists.

Well there’s more chance this year with Marzipan, which brings iOS apps to the Mac. Which was previewed last year