Apple Music vs Spotify

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"

besides, people who use spotify rather than purchase music are not limited to the poor

true, I imagine they also include a lot of middle- and/or working-class people whose budgets more easily allow for $15 a month than $15 a CD

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.

― I Am Curious (Dolezal) (DJP), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 10:57 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Oh, you drive a car to work? You turned on your air conditioning today? STOP PRETENDING YOU CARE AT ALL WHAT HAPPENS TO THE PLANET!

Except if I don't drive my car to work or turn on my air conditioning, it will do exactly zero to slow the advance of global warming. Only collective action works. Just like my putting an extra few hundred dollars a year, in aggregate, in the pockets of all of the artists I listen to will make almost no difference to their lives.

I mean, if someone is living on minimum wage but has made the choice to be on Apple Music, I'm not churlish enough to be all "you fiend, taking music from the mouths of starving musicians" because that person is doing some budgetary magic of their own to even be in the game (possibly/probably from a losing position). I'm talking about people like me who claim they can't afford to pay for albums, even MP3 albums, but love their favorite artists and lament that the industry is imploding around them; they are lying to everyone, including themselves. If they wanted to, they could afford it; they are choosing not to pay. And what I am saying is "be honest about the ramifications of that choice".

xp: actually I take public transportation to work because I want to limit the driving I do as part of being a responsible citizen in a city that affords me transportation options, but apparently that's meaningless and I should go out and buy 10 Hummers that I just let idle on the side street next to our house

true, I imagine they also include a lot of middle- and/or working-class people whose budgets more easily allow for $15 a month than $15 a CD

― for sale: baby shoes, never worn your ass (katherine), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 11:01 AM (43 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm not arguing with this at all! Anyone with a fixed amount of money to spend, which is most of us, is sensitive to what things cost, and is going to be better off financially when they spend less. Still, if there was no Spotify (and no downloading), some of those working/middle class people would decide it's worth spending $15/CD on music (and maybe this would mean slightly less on some other discretionary item), and in aggregate this might amount to more money going to artists. Not that I think going back to that model is on the table.

I would like to reiterate that my actual point here is "do what you want to do but don't lie to yourself and everyone else about what you are doing"

xp: actually I take public transportation to work because I want to limit the driving I do as part of being a responsible citizen in a city that affords me transportation options, but apparently that's meaningless and I should go out and buy 10 Hummers that I just let idle on the side street next to our house

― I Am Curious (Dolezal) (DJP), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 11:05 AM (21 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I take public transit to work too. I also live in a 1300 sf apt though and I do use AC, not cranked, but I use it. I could live with my entire family in a 550 sf studio and avoid AC and dramatically cut my carbon footprint. I could never take an airplane again anywhere and live a perfectly fine life. I could switch to an all-vegan diet. Should I stop thinking of myself as a "good person" because I don't do these things? Do I have no right to argue that there should be collective/regulatory action on global warming because I live an American lifestyle and don't fully "walk the walk"?

What does any of this have to do with apple music vs spotify.

There should be a separate ethics and economics of streaming music thread.

Should I stop thinking of myself as a "good person" because I don't do these things?

Either that or you should change your definition of what a "good person" is.

Also, Jeff is right.

since when did ilm threads stick to the opening point? lol

xp

I know, crazy idea!

there's no such thing as a "good person," people make thousands if not millions of moral decisions per day, if anything thinking of oneself as a "good person" makes one more likely to be complacent about them

lol Ethics and Economics of Streaming sounds like it's be a ___ for non-majors course, only I'm not sure what dept

Jeff killed the thread

the line graphs showing total dollars spent on music over the past 30 years are a horror show for the music industry. what i'm not sure is whether it's the casual fans who are to blame (they didn't buy music anyway, right?), or the hardcore fans like the writer of the article above who have abandoned their expensive habits (are there enough of these people to make a difference?)

i mean, what's easy to forget as someone who Loves Music is that the vast majority of people never bought CDs except as special occasions anyway. like waaay less than 1 a month. so it seems reasonable to suggest that past a certain threshold, streaming subscribers + (diminished) purchasers would on aggregate be spending more on music than just purchasers did before.

spotify

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

that is of course true. but if that's the case for this particular invisible oranges writer, then his using spotify isn't doing any financial harm to anyone, because he wouldn't have/couldn't have bought all those records anyway.

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)?