Apple Music vs Spotify

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

i've updated everything and still have the burger menu

Is there any way of updating spotify from within the app? Or do you have to go to their site to look for a new version?

it's ios, i get what i'm given

This is the most poorly argued article I have read in a very long time:

https://medium.com/cuepoint/streaming-exclusives-are-over-904ed4a93286#.rzumcct4c

"Stream exclusives are unpopular, according to one online poll, so they are done forever, and that's great news," basically. There's literally no evidence of that. There were more exclusives than ever in 2016, and Apple has made it clear these are part of Apple Music's business model going forward. I can't even guess how something like this got published.

anyone else been experiencing an increase in weird performance annoyances with Spotify lately? my new beef is trying to open up my podcasts or other downloaded stuff when i'm not on wifi, just getting the spinning green thing that's waiting for internet. i know i don't have internet, that's why i downloaded some podcasts, just let me skip to the 'downloaded episodes' screen please!

in general maybe podcast functionality just hasn't been fully baked in yet... there's no way to add an RSS link thing (needed for patreon exclusive content), and the desktop podcast interface is totally different than the mobile one, offering no lineup of new episodes for shows you're following.

I don't use spotify for podcasts, but I've noticed that putting spotify in offline mode makes downloaded playlists load a lot faster.

Same. Sometimes it goes unresponsive when I switch on/offline.. have to kill the app and start it again, and it's quick

https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/spotify-and-amazon-sue-songwriters-in-appeal-against-royalty-rise-in-the-united-states/

A recent Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) ruling brought great news for songwriters in the US – with royalty rates for streaming and other mechanical uses set to rise 44% in the market.

Spotify and Amazon have now officially come out in opposition to the ruling, in what the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) has called a “shameful” move which equates to “suing songwriters”.

On January 27, 2018 MBW reported on the CRB’s landmark decision, which stated that royalty rates paid to songwriters in the US from on-demand subscription streaming would rise by 44% over the next five years. That decision was ratified last month (February 5), when the CRB published the final rates and terms for songwriters.

Streaming companies were given 30 days to lodge official opposition to the ruling if they wished. The likes of Apple Music declined to do so – but it’s a different case for Spotify and Amazon, which have now both filed a notice of appeal. Pandora and Google have also asked the CRB to review its decision.

In a statement today (March 7), the NMPA said that a “huge victory for songwriters is now in jeopardy” due to the streaming services’ filings.

I'm just guessing but I suspect Apple Music isn't a massive moneymaker anyway and Apple is sitting on a pile of cash as big as the sun so who cares? but for Spotify it's a potentially existential issue (despite Gimlet acquisition & podcasting etc)? and Amazon are suing because really what else would you expect Amazon to do?

wow I missed Spotify buying Gimlet! I suspect that's going to compound this existential issue.

well i think the idea is to mitigate it or hedge against it. podcast listeners stay on their platform longer, and crucially a podcast listen doesn't require any royalties to be paid to anyone, so if they can just tip the numbers a little towards speech content all their spreadsheets look better. but having to pay out massively more in royalties could erase all those "gains"

That must be the hope, long term. 340 mil sounds nuts. Maybe they will start producing some cheaper stuff than Gimlet's usual "prestige" programmes