Apple Music vs Spotify

256 kbps v spotify's 320 kbps iirc xp

for a few more months i have a premium account with deezer - came as part of the sonos package.

so, that.

doubt i will renew it though, as i rarely use it.

Haven't heard anything about Apple Music that has persuaded me to try it.

I don't have to pay for Spotify if I don't want to, whereas last I heard I did have to pay for Apple Music. Maybe I'm reaching pre-mature old age, but if I'm paying money for something, I still kinda want a physical product.

if I'm paying money for something, I still kinda want a physical product.

so you don't pay for any kind of tv programming? or for the internet? or to go to a movie?

Do we really need another thread about this ?

I thought wth apple music out a while now it was worth polling to see which service was the most popular on ilx. You needn't click on it if you dont want to.

I haven't posted much, but I'm sort of between jobs and have had a bit of time on my hands so fwiw...

Spotify has age behind it, so I'm sort of baked into it - old, long playlists of stuff, the simple fact of familiarity, good integration across all platforms, collaborative playlists, plenty good enough catalogue, 320kbps streaming. I don't use the radio or curated playlist stuff to know enough about how good they are.

Apple Music, in the month I've been using it has all of this as well, albeit the iPad app is a bit shonky, it also has a far better UI. Lacks collaborative playlists, and the playback is 256kbps but I can live with that. Apple also has far better customisable iD3 tagging, if that's your thing (it's mine).

Apple wins in one crucial aspect: the integration of the user's own catalogue. Spotify is shit for this, as it has no cloud/match service. I wouldn't be surprised it they're working on one.

Google Play Music probably has the best UI of the lot, to be honest, is good across platforms and devices, and you can upload up to 50,000 songs. So in theory it should support decent catalogue integration. I need to sign up for the 'All Access' feature to try it. The catalogue is broadly similar to the others. It's got a weird 1000 song limit for playlists. The tagging is pretty execrable.

What I reckon I'll end up doing is paying for Apple (mainly because of the way it manages my own library) and using Google Play for when I'm out and about (until the mooted Android iTunes, then who knows).

As you can imagine, I'm a hit with the ladies.

Also, the Apple curated playlists are actually pretty decent, if you're into that kind of thing - found some nice kosmische stuff last week, plenty of good ambient/drone playlists, a best of drone jazz thing and a great 'Tortoise influences' playlist.

but arent there loads of playlists on Spotify of that? A lot of users make their playlists public

ok, just tried to add the spotify add-on to my sonos app.
however, it needs a premium account.
well, that's that then.

I can't even fathom using free Spotify. ADS ARE THE DEVIL!

Cosmic Slop - the diff is that Apple serves up their own curated playlists in the "For You" tab, tailored based on your purchase/listen history, and for some reason they feel a little more muso-nerdy, and a little more relevant

I'm very happy with Spotify, and I fucking hate iTunes, so I have no reason to even try Apple Music, not even going to touch it.

I'm perfectly happy with iTunes as a personal library maintenance/playback application, but that function is suddenly a zit on giant, the streaming service. I wish they'd rolled out Apple Music as a separate (but integratable) app. At this point I'm leaning towards dumping AM at the end of the trial period and keeping Spotify.

there is no way I'm touching Apple Music with a ten foot pole

tracer - ahh ok, but every monday Spotify gives you a playlist too - discover weekly. Is it much different to that?

The Apple Music playlists are excellent. I find it an easier and more pleasurable interface for exploring new music than Spotify. I've been a Spotify premium user since 2008 or early 2009.

I still use iTunes and have no problem with it, even though my iMac is an ancient mid-2007 model.

I wish they'd rolled out Apple Music as a separate (but integratable) app.

I may have taken a trial then tho I do like Spotify having been premium for donkeys years.
I hate itunes and use it only for my ipod.

i once installed itunes to get a certain high profile freebie, but when things went wrong, i dug around under the covers and realised just what a mess it was, and so, backed out.
never again.
following the experience, i had a discussion with a proper s/w apple friendly nerd friend of mine re the chaos re file structures under the covers, and his reasoning was that apple/itunes users just give their trust over to the s/w and have little care as to what actually happens underneath the GUI, which may be true, but its something i could never be comfortable with.
also to get back on thread, i have no need to pay for a premium service given that there are huge sections of my cd/digital archive that have yet to be given the attention they so deserve.

but dont you want to hear new music?

umm .. yes.
but not that often i need to have a subscription.
i use youtube/official websites, and if i like, i buy the cd.

i dont understand how anybody can listen to whole albums on youtube. the quality is terrible anyway but on a laptop or phone its far far worse

apple music has been fine for me after the first few days where it didn't sync things very well. I like it just fine. spotify is fine too but crucially, I can get a 'family' account for apple music and my wife and kid can use it for $15 / month which seems like a decent deal, and spotify doesn't. and spotify with ads annoys me.

Winamp

spotify has a family account! i have it, same pricing.

Spottiefy!

Yeah what, we have the Spotify family account and it's $15/month.

wow that's new.

I did have my first annoying possibly Music related issue in a while today: songs, which were on my iphone, not in the cloud, would not play unless I went into airplane mode. I twas like it was constantly trying to make a connection (my connection was lousy). Not sure what was going on but don't like the idea that it might be eating up bandwidth even when the songs are on my phone.

I did have my first annoying possibly Music related issue in a while today: songs, which were on my iphone, not in the cloud, would not play unless I went into airplane mode.

every time i feel ready to try apple music again, someone reports another incredibly dumb issue like this. spotify has an offline mode which works for weeks without phoning home all the time.

The playlists I have transferred to my phone via Apple Music (containing non-cloud music) still don't show up there since the launch of this thing. How is this not fixed yet?

http://www.invisibleoranges.com/2015/08/damage-done-how-much-money-i-didnt-spend-in-2014-because-of-spotify/

The thing that makes blog posts like that super fatuous is NO ONE IS STOPPING YOU FROM PURCHASING A NON-STREAMING VERSION OF THE MUSIC YOU LIKE IF THAT'S ACTUALLY IMPORTANT TO YOU. Dude is trying to have his cake and eat it, too; you can't be all "streaming pay rates are criminal, I can't abide that type of thievery to artists OH HEY I SAVED $700 THIS YEAR YAY" without at least acknowledging that your statement of caring about what artists make is a lie you are telling yourself so that you can continue to believe that you uphold the values you think you should have.

I dunno Dan, I mean life is full of those kinds of economic/moral contradictions. When a product is legally available for less money, very few people will deliberately pay more money for it regardless of their moral convictions (e.g. sweatshop clothing).

Nowhere did I say that one shouldn't make the choice to save money. What I said was "stop pretending like the moral question is more important to you than saving money" (with the I hope unnecessary-to-state caveat that we are talking about luxury items that it is assumed the consumer in question can afford; a person who can afford the cost of a device capable of streaming as well as the sustaining costs of a subscription to an online service and a streaming service can afford an offline device capable of playing CDs)

saving money isn't always a choice, often it is more like a necessity

of course anyone who can afford a computer/smartphone and streaming subscription can afford a CD player and CDs/mp3 player and mp3s; the difference is that one is a fixed cost and one is a potentially infinite cost. buying used can cut down that cost significantly depending on what you buy, but A) that itself is a compromise in terms of money making it to the artists and B) it is still a potentially infinite cost.

We all (I assume) agree that minimum wage should be raised even if it means paying slightly higher prices but I doubt many of us would voluntarily pay a higher "support workers" price where a lower one was offered.

Not to mention how futile it would be to do so as an individual

again, in many cases you are mistaking "would voluntarily pay" with "are able under our budget to pay"

well that's a whole other thing, but "afford" is a slippery concept. When there was no spotify, many of us "afforded" paying more for physical recordings (or else taped/burned them from friends, I guess).

you're either referring to a time when illegal downloading was rampant, or when the economy was not a shambles

not that all of this doesn't have moral ramifications -- of course it does, no one is disputing it. but treating it as a completely free moral choice with no other variables -- the equivalent of one of those "flip the switch and kill one person / leave the switch and kill ten" questions -- gets into dicey territory fast.

Do all of the people who claim they "can't afford" music also never travel, never eat in restaurants, never go out to bars, never see movies, never purchase books, never partake in any form of entertainment that costs money? I'm sure there are some who fit that category, but there are plenty of people with some discretionary spending who make the rational choice that they "can't afford" to purchase music -- as long as there is a cheaper or free alternative. If the alternative wasn't there, they'd pay for it, and some other part of discretionary spending would take the hit.

that naivety is built into the article tho. in any retail system handwringing about distributors driving down the profits of manufacturers is addressing the wrong problem - you're decrying a feature of the economic system that's intrinsic to that economic system

or in brief, lol ethical consumerism

Do all of the people who claim they "can't afford" music also never travel, never eat in restaurants, never go out to bars, never see movies, never purchase books, never partake in any form of entertainment that costs money? I'm sure there are some who fit that category, but there are plenty of people with some discretionary spending who make the rational choice that they "can't afford" to purchase music -- as long as there is a cheaper or free alternative. If the alternative wasn't there, they'd pay for it, and some other part of discretionary spending would take the hit.

― five six and (man alive), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 11:55 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is perilously close to the "if they're really that poor then why do they have cell phones?" argument

of course anyone who can afford a computer/smartphone and streaming subscription can afford a CD player and CDs/mp3 player and mp3s; the difference is that one is a fixed cost and one is a potentially infinite cost.

Define "fixed cost" here; assuming you mean "a predictable amount every month", either method can be put into a bounded budget controlled by the consumer, making either a predictable amount every month. One does give you more music at your disposal than the other; I'm not disputing that. And xposts make me think that we're pretty much on the same page here, I'm just being kind of a dick about it.

We all (I assume) agree that minimum wage should be raised even if it means paying slightly higher prices but I doubt many of us would voluntarily pay a higher "support workers" price where a lower one was offered.

I don't disagree. What I'm saying is that making that choice when it's offered to you and you have the ability to pay the higher price shows what your actual priorities are, and if your self-image as a "good person" involves the other choice, walk the walk or stop lying to yourself.

Do all of the people who claim they "can't afford" music also never travel, never eat in restaurants, never go out to bars, never see movies, never purchase books, never partake in any form of entertainment that costs money? I'm sure there are some who fit that category, but there are plenty of people with some discretionary spending who make the rational choice that they "can't afford" to purchase music -- as long as there is a cheaper or free alternative. If the alternative wasn't there, they'd pay for it, and some other part of discretionary spending would take the hit.

― five six and (man alive), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 11:55 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is perilously close to the "if they're really that poor then why do they have cell phones?" argument

― for sale: baby shoes, never worn your ass (katherine), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 10:57 AM (18 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

no, it's really not at all

Define "fixed cost" here; assuming you mean "a predictable amount every month", either method can be put into a bounded budget controlled by the consumer, making either a predictable amount every month. One does give you more music at your disposal than the other; I'm not disputing that. And xposts make me think that we're pretty much on the same page here, I'm just being kind of a dick about it.

― I Am Curious (Dolezal) (DJP), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 11:57 AM (3 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that would indeed be the definition of a "fixed cost"

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

here's a new annoying wrinkle with spotify: got an email telling me my student subscription will expire soon unless i reverify. click here to be taken to a page to "reverify now!" okay sure. except the page i'm taken to has no links anywhere to let me reverify anything, it just blathers about the benefits of the student program. "did you find what you're looking for?" "no, sure didn't, which is annoying since ya'll sent me here" - but the "did you find..." form explicitly tells you they don't respond individually to queries, so.... (shrug emoji)

would it kill either of these services to identify reissues as such? DG has reprinted the "Under Stalin's Shadow" Shostakovich set from Andris Nelsons & the BSO, or maybe it just came to Spotify this year (the cover art on Spotify is different from the cover art on DG's site), but the year of its issue is "2019" -- this makes a difference, imo. Not usually super trainspotterish about stuff like this but it's nice to know, among "new releases," what's new & what reissued

I know, my "new releases" lists are always a disappointment - they're 75% reissues.

Release dates come from the labels, not us (Spotify). We would much prefer they were correct, but the labels don't always share this imperative...

a lot of reissue albums do carry the original release year on the artist's discography. Spotify never "corrects" those that don't?

I feel like I've had them show up on Release Radar either way. Not sure now.

All that really bugs me with the radar playlist is not knowing if the artist has a new album or just a single, without clicking through on the "album" title.

ah Fridays

We do sometimes fix dates on high-profile releases, but the scale of the issue is...large.

So I've just been given access to Youtube Music from my Google Music account. It's still dead from a social standpoint, but does have a *killer* feature - it treats youtube music videos as song files you can add to your library and playlists. This is amazing for obscure tracks, mixes etc.

With Apple Music's spatial/lossless audio supposedly coming this month, has anyone noticed signs that it's already started? A lot of my newer music files no longer show bitrates, which indicates they may have already been converted over to the new format. All of the songs I added from January 2019 and earlier, however, haven't been touched.

I'm thinking about signing up for Apple Music, but I don't want to mess up my current iTunes library of files that I've ripped and downloaded over many years. It's proven difficult to find a straight answer to these questions online... maybe very few people care about these things...

(I would be using it on PC + iPhone)

-If I subscribe to Apple Music, is there still a way for me to view just my local library, or is it always mixed in with my streaming library?

-Can I assign my own iTunes metadata (genre especially) to streaming albums? One item on the growing list of reasons why I don't like Spotify is that it is impossible to organize albums unless you make playlists out of them and manually move them around.

-Can I use iCloud to upload all my local files so that they are available to stream and/or download to my phone?

Bottom line is I'm scared to fuck up my current iTunes setup because I've worked hard on it - ripping, tagging, retagging downloads, etc.

I don't want to add to the confusion by speculating. But, yes, you can upload to the cloud and stream. I use this a lot as I listen to a lot of... obscurities.

Bottom line is I'm scared to fuck up my current iTunes setup because I've worked hard on it - ripping, tagging, retagging downloads, etc.

-If I subscribe to Apple Music, is there still a way for me to view just my local library, or is it always mixed in with my streaming library?

I was worried about this too, but took the chance and started the free trial of Apple Music earlier in the week. My library seems to be fine, segregated from the streaming service.

-Can I assign my own iTunes metadata (genre especially) to streaming albums?

I don't think so, but that seems a good thing to me -- any integration of Library and Streaming would give Apple an inroad to fuck up your files.

The Search function seems weird and fucked up. I was doing some basic searches to get a feel for the interface and immediately ran into problems. If you go to the Beatles artist page, scroll down to Albums and click "Show All," you don't get all of them. The only versions of Let It Be showing are ...Naked and the 2021 mix. You have to do a search for "Beatles Let It Be" before you can see the original 1970 album and the 57-track Super Deluxe version. None of the Super Deluxe versions are visible in Beatles > Albums > Show All.

I switched from paid Spotify to Apple Music a long time ago, but sometimes I'd still open up Spotify for particular music discovery: search for a particular song -> browse playlists that include that song. For whatever reason, Apple Music's search results never provided anything useful for playlists beyond the Apple-branded playlists.

It seems like Spotify might've recently updated their search results for the playlist section to prioritize playlist titles (and maybe just not include tracklists in search result criteria, which seems crazy?). Is there a way to do this in Spotify or Apple Music that I'm missing? Or is there another big music streaming service that would allow me to search and browse playlists via search for a particular song (or songs)?