I use Youtube Premium - which has its own music offering in the price plus ad free vids
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I’m a big Apple fan, and i am trying really hard to like Apple Music, however they keep changing things, which for me are not for the better! I also have Spotify which my daughter uses, and it does still have the edge, i think! However i am still struggling to decide! Really interesting reading everybody’s views here.
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Spotify are currently experimenting with some changes to make Podcasts ‘easier’ too so if you are a Podcast listener, it might soon become an ‘all in one’ listening app.
(It won’t kick Overcast out for me I think but will see)
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Good point, i had forgotten about Podcasts … however i think its going to take some going to overtake Overcast, i’ve been using it for awhile and really like that.
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I’ve been using Spotify since their original Beta, for me their apps are superior to Apple’s and I haven’t really ever thought about changing either!
I use Apple Music because as a fan of Hayao Miyazaki and Joe Hisaishi, Apple Music has pretty much all of Studio Ghibli’s soundtracks while Spotify has not. Apple Music also offers a dedicated soundtrack genre, making it easier to find albums whereas Spotify is very… spotty. The same can be said of other genres too. Searching for music is about the same quality across both services.
Apple Music also has the ability to easily upload your own imported music and play across multiple Apple (and Android) devices. Apple Music also has a significantly higher number of allowance of downloaded tracks across devices, and you can have 5 devices rather than three. I also like that if you happen to like a particular moment in a track, you can adjust the start and end times of the playback and this will sync across your devices.
The downside to Apple Music is that if you add an album with tracks that aren’t licensed for that particularly album, but exist elsewhere (either as singles or as part of a compilation), Apple will add that album separately rather than integrating everything with the same album, making organising things a little more “fun” (read: mess).
My favourite thing with Spotify, however, is the weekly Discover playlists. Sometimes it gets it right, sometimes not, but always fun.
I should mention I’m very much tied into the Apple ecosystem - Mac, iPad Pro, iPhone XS Max, Apple Watch series 4, etc. and have made many attempts to leave (including replacing Apple Music with Spotify), but I always come back to Apple.
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Apple Music ,only because I get 6months free on my EE contract
Can’t knock Spotify or deezer. Apple has some incredible content including some rare Detroit techno which I’m a huge fan of .
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The one thing Spotify does much better is playlists (creation and management of) which is where the bulk of my use is.
Or I’d be Apple Music too but every time I try… ugh!
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My friend gets a professional Spotify downloader, which can help me to download Spotify music to local files without premium, so that I can make sure hard working artists and their teams don’t get paid when I listen to their work.
Fixed that for you mate 
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I’ve been a big fan of Spotify for a long long time, I think it’s better in nearly every way than Apple Music. But… they don’t let me stream offline on my watch. The API is there, other apps do it, but not Spotify.
So for a while I was paying for Apple Music just so I can have music when I run and leave my phone at home.
Now I’ve switched over fully as I don’t really use the Apple Music app, the differences don’t matter as much. I tell Siri what to play and I think AM is better at playing similar songs/carrying on after your chosen song has finished. I’ve moved my playlists over too which was fairly painless.
Spotify all the way with premium. Great playlists multiple devices works work with Bose hone speaker. Also like the integrated podcasts.
I’ve always found Spotify’s recommendation algorithm to be useless. It just recommends me more of what I’ve already listened to, like Amazon consistently recommending fridges because I bought one two months ago.
That and the grotesque way they’re treating the podcast market turn me off them completely.
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I’ve been with Apple Music since day be, and it has got massively better in the last year especially. the content from Apple Music One is the decider for me, the Bicep radio show they had was great, and that spending power Apple can bring to getting content is great.
I still have a Spotify account as part of a friends family account, and that powers the Sonos in the house.
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Would love to know a little more about this. To give you a little background, when content is delivered to both Spotify and Apple Music (/iTunes) a start time is provided. Music will go live at midnight local time on the date provided.
There are a few exceptions to this. Spotify for example support timed releases, so we’re able to set the exact minute releases go live on their service. This will usually be tied in with a radio premiere or TV performance.
The only difference I can think is if a release is delivered to both services with an immediate start time. On Apple’s service you can expect to see the music live and indexed in search within around 1-3 hours. With Spotify you’re looking at 24-72 hours. But generally speaking that’s not an issue, 99% of the time releases are delivered with enough lead time for it not to be an issue.
Ah got it. It sounds very much like music is being delivered very shortly before release then. Possibly due to piracy concerns, contractual issues or maybe the process between their labels and distributors for the rest of the world isn’t as smooth as it could be.
Definitely interesting though. Tidal, Deezer and YouTube Music are all pretty speedy with their ingestion cycles too so I wonder whether you’d see a better experience with them as well.
On a separate note Spotify are coming to market later this year with a HD audio streaming tier. That may end up being a key differentiator for a few people here.
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What do you mean by grotesque? I don’t like what they’re doing in terms of trying to take over the market and circumvented the open nature of RSS.
But in commercial terms I think they have the opportunity to massively expand the market and make it much easier for the average podcast to monetise.
I use and like Spotify but Apple Music loses for me just on the fact that it doesn’t support Google Cast.
I can’t see that changing but I’d be open minded to switching if not for that.
Looks like Spotify price increases are finally coming.
Family is going up to £16.99 and I’ve seen a few people saying student and individual plans are rising too.
I’m not sure why the value of music has stayed constant for so long whilst we’ve seen services like Netflix increase their prices on a regular basis. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Apple follow suit soon.
This won’t be popular amongst everyone and there will be lots of parties who benefit, but ultimately more money going into the revenue share model = more money for artists on the other end.
I just got the email and am interested to see if other services will follow.
I would say that the comparison to Netflix doesn’t really work as the business models are fundamentally different. Netflix themselves are spending billions on creating original content which then costs them ‘nothing’ to stream in perpetuity. Every new customer helps offset Netflix’s costs.
Spotify doesn’t produce any content iteself but the majority of it’s revenue goes straight out the door to the record companies. Every new streaming customer increases the money being paid out.
I wouldn’t just assume that this means more money for artists. It’ll be interesting to see how much of this increase ends up with artists. I know there has been talk recently about Apple paying $0.01 per stream (or something to that end) which I also believe is quite misleading. Artists aren’t paid per stream, they’re paid based on their proportionate number of streams against the total.
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I should probably point out first of all that I work in the industry and deal with service contracts on a regular basis so my views on this are a little biased.
Spotify do the same, most of it comes under their podcasting business though.
Yep, that’s what the revenue share model is, so by its very definition more money coming in means more money going out the other end.
You might find this interesting: Apple Music is making claims about what it pays artists. Let’s take a closer look.
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