Apple Music vs Spotify

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)?