Apple Music vs Spotify

saying "don't worry, the community aspects will come" is pretty weak imo - this ain't rehearsal

by that i mean it's not just a matter of going off and ~doing~ a community. it makes sense to get a feel for how people will use a service before trying to cultivate something like that, especially if you're apple and your previous attempts have been sort of hilarious.

iovine (?) indicated in a recent interview that they're going to build the social-type features over time rather than driving headlong into it.

and tbf if they're going to get one thing right it should be the playing music part

I've gone for Spotify in the end. I'd happily pay a few quid a month for the 'For You' playlists, but everything else is a mess. Another big factor is the ongoing non-appearance of the Android app. Is that any closer to reality?

I'm amazed they're even bothering with an Android app. Surely the whole point is to drive sales of iPhones?

itunes store on android without apple music doesn't make any sense if you're betting that the future of music is streaming.

I'm keeping both for the moment - the extravagance of it!

Don't purchase much recorded music any more- do go to shows and occasionally buy CDs directly from the artist, so I am keeping both as well for now.

lol Luna.

I'm skinto this year so needed to make that break - even a tenner a month is going to BURN. My loyalty is to Spotify, so that's where the cash is going. For now.

Possibly a deal breaker for Apple Music - if you cancel or let your paid membership lapse, then " If you lapse on your membership, you have a limited time before you would lose access to your music." This is unlike spotify where if you stop paying, you still have your playlists etc.

Extortion! Fuck apple music!

Just got a clarification that it's 90 days after cancellation.

"If you stop paying for this storage space, we will throw your stuff out and give the space to someone else" is not extortion

This isn't really about the storage space, this is about building up playlists, saving playlists, sharing playlists etc that all goes away if you don't pay. I think they should maintain the playlists but have the unavailable songs greyed out - would encourage people to resubscribe and they wouldn't lose any work they've put into it.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/10/20/apple_music_has_6_5_million_subscribers_does_that_make_it_a_failure.html

Google is about to announce ad free Youtube "Red" which will include Google Play Music.

'redtube' is already a thing i'm p sure

http://thenextweb.com/google/2015/10/21/heres-why-youtube-red-named-its-product-that/

tl;dr they know about redtube and they're like eh

“As we talked to users and fans in our studies, the term ‘red’ is often associated with YouTube. It has a lot of meaning in terms of love and the red carpet.”

this guy's salary is probably more than my house

so it's not an homage to taylor swift?

lol xp

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/oct/27/apple-music-subscribers-siri-questions

not even "this is what wikipedia says", just "fuck off"

bizarre of Apple to suggest that they 'own' the charts?

you too can buy an app to fix this http://www.macrumors.com/2016/01/20/music-tracker-apple-music-library-monitoring/

that is funny (and sad) but can i just for posterity quote this plz

As an example, Dodson cites a recent change to a studio recording of Billy Joel's "Uptown Girl," which was silently swapped over to a live version on Apple Music. Music Tracker noted the change and Dodson was able to find a replacement studio recording on another album.

http://f.cl.ly/items/3I3R0D1L2A0I3e3E421V/IMG_3934.jpg

ok fuck you i'll go to macy's instead!

http://f.cl.ly/items/3P0c3O1n25321C1H3c36/IMG_3928.jpg

So for $10 a month I get no commercials on Youtube plus virtually the same music library as the other services. That said, google play music is not very much "fun" compared to spotify's social-ness and Apple's curation.

http://9to5mac.com/2016/04/18/songshift-import-spotify-playlists-apple-music/

Works the best of any playlist converter I've tried. So much faster.

jeff, are you having trouble with apple music? still reports of offline music & playlists deleting and favourites vanishing in ios 9.3.1, and i can't get a grip on how many people are affected.

Not much trouble. There have been great improvements with the reliability of offline music and playlists. I haven't had any more issues of songs not downloading or playlists deleting. The matching still sucks though, with live versions of songs replacing album versions sometimes. IDK if that will ever get better. Overall I'm happy. Only thing I miss about spotify is the social/collaboration.

excellent, apart from the icml matching, which apple's going to need to let us override at some point.

i've bitten the bullet and set it all up again, updating here with success/failure.

what's better about it than Spotify?

I can heart music. Spotify took away my stars. That's the number one issue with me. When Spotify did that it completely fucked with the way I listen to music.

I use it because it loads almost instantly on my 2007 iMac, and I like the playlists. Spotify takes a few minutes to fully load up these days.

The recommended playlists are very good, as well.

Oops...the repetition of senility sets in.

what's better about it than Spotify?

the curation aspect is not better imo but different: shorter playlists, more specific recommendations. also apple music doesn't limit what you can save offline, but spotify's limit is ~3,333 songs per device across three devices.

given that they're already collecting metadata about what we like and listen to heaps, i want one of these services to go "based on these songs from the '70s/80s that you like, here's a load of music from the past 12–18 months that's basically the same sort of thing". but i mean explicitly as a labelled service, not just in a black-box discover weekly/"14 tracks inspired by brian eno" kind of way, and not just "you like old duran duran so here's some new duran duran", and not just "well you like tormato so here's some flower kings".

Man, I love the convenience of Apple Music, especially on my phone. "Siri, play this album," and bam, it's playing while I'm driving. But the sound is a bummer... it really sounds flat to me. Not sure if Spotify's sound is any better? But I hate the Spotify interface so much maybe it's worth the tradeoff.

Tidal has the best sound even w normal settings, unfortunately.

If they had had some sort of notification system like spotify's I'd be tempted to switch back, actually.

zero problems with apple music for some time now, quite reliable and worth it IMO. some catalogue shortcomings but mainly for obscure stuff

youtube red just launched in australia so i'm back on google play music. still no eq on ios (why ffs) but it's reliable, the catalogue is solid and it's better than apple music at handling uploads.

now that spple music is working for me 95% of the time and a major rebuild is (apparently) underway, i'm ready to ditch spotify entirely. i can't justify paying for the same content three times, and there's no sign of spotify killing its 3,333-song offline limit (and i've still got that shitty hamburger menu for some reason). recently i've stopped using it altogether.

imo spotify needs to do something big to keep/entice users, because as it stands the curation aspect alone is not enough to justify, and the competition is catching up very quickly.

agreed. the app experience is so slow and unsatisfying on both mobile and desktop. it's hard to remember now but spotify's quantum leap when it launched was the instantaneousness of its streaming. it literally seemed like magic. they don't have a monopoly on that anymore, and their catalogue is the same as everybody else's.. is discover weekly + mood-based playlists + few and far-between exclusives enough? not when every time i open the app i want to hurl the phone out the window.

It's more about the constant notifications for new releases, the easy sharing of playlists and the ability to see what my friends and colleagues are or have been listening to or playlisting for me. Making a real best of Vybz Kartel playlist (literally hundreds of tracks!) takes time, but among Spotify's millions of users, SOMEONE has in fact made that list, because they're a fan, and stuff like that is infinitely more valuable to me than another curated P4k list that worries way too much about being cool.

that is true.

Slight tangent, and I'm probably being dense, but is there a definitive way to search Spotify playlists? I've not found a satisfying method and I'm sure I'm missing decent stuff. I always end up using Google.

agreed. the app experience is so slow and unsatisfying on both mobile and desktop.

i can't speak for the mobile redesign (i still don't have it), but with the burger menu it's torture trying to get from one part of the app to another. half the time swiping back adds a song to my queue and i have to go out and back in and delete it. the mac client is better but i still need to open it twice before it'll work.

other than that spotify is as reliable as they come, it's just superfluous for me now.

the instantaneousness of its streaming. it literally seemed like magic. they don't have a monopoly on that anymore, and their catalogue is the same as everybody else's..

yeah, so curation is the differentiator, but if enough people don't care enough to keep it around just for that, spotfy's going to be in trouble. i hope its recent acquisitions shake things up a bit before apple's and google's services really mature.

burger menu is gone now you should update