Apple Music vs. Spotify

10 Jan, 2025

In December, I took advantage of a 1-month free trial of Apple Music. At the time, I thought I was going to be able to get 2 months...but for some reason that didn't work. Whatever. 1 month is plenty! I signed up for the family plan, trying to implore my wife to try it as well since she really likes using Spotify; if the switch to Apple Music was going to be permanent, I needed her on board.

Well, she didn't end up trying it very much and we stuck with Spotify, but there's a little more to it than just "my wife prefers Spotify".

Apple Music

One of the things that drew me to Apple Music (aside from the free trial) was the constant mention of higher audio quality. This was immediately apparent in the first few songs I listened to - I could actually hear the extra detail (or at least, I thought I could). Initially I thought this was just a bit of music snobbery, thinking that my ears probably wouldn't notice. I was wrong. I didn't do any scientific experimenting, like comparing a song streamed on Spotify vs. Apple Music, but I was certainly struck by the difference while driving home from work one day.

I also appreciate the UI of Apple Music. It's simple. It gives you music, compared to Spotify that pushes everything to you: music, podcasts, audio books, etc. When I open a music streaming app, I am looking for music, thank you very much. It also feels very "clean", which is a very subjective description and probably varies from person-to-person.

The app very much focuses on music selection and curation. In other words, in most cases it's designed to allow you to pick what music you want to hear. On the curation side, the playlists are curated - I think - by real people, and are updated somewhat regularly. There are some automated mixes that change depending on what you're listening to, which meant that at first I was getting a lot of jazz (because when I switched I was listening to some jazz albums). But as I listened to more music, I got a little bit more of the type of music I was listening to at the time - mid-2000s alt rock.

I emphasized "type" because it wasn't giving me the same tracks over and over. Well, in some cases it did give me some of the same songs I had already listened to, but it WAS giving me songs I either hadn't heard in a long time or songs from that era I hadn't heard, ever. It's too bad that the algorithmic playlists require a lot of listening and liking of songs to "get to know you" because a month isn't long enough for that, no matter how much listening you do. In one month you could be interested in listening to a different genre than any other given month.

Where I thought it initially won me over permanently was that I was able to sync my library across devices; this meant that I now had streaming access to songs in my library on my Macbook. This is decades worth of music I've personally curated, some of which not available to stream. I listened to some of that last month! That was fun. However, as I discovered after cancelling my trial, I still have access to that music - so it's not dependent on a subscription, thankfully¹.

But in terms of functionality it did lose me in cross-device control. What I like about Spotify is that you can listen on one device, and use another to control it. For example I could hook up my old Galaxy S9+ to my stereo, and control the music from my current Galaxy S21+. With Apple Music, that's only possible across Apple devices. And playback isn't synced between devices - if I play a song on my iPod, my phone doesn't know what I've been playing.

Spotify

This is basically the section about why I'm keeping Spotify. The short answer is that it's convenient. As I mentioned just above, I like being able to control playback between different devices and that my listening activity is synced. In my opinion it is a truly cross-platform streaming service, whereas Apple Music is geared toward Apple products (cue sarcastic shocked Pikachu meme).

And I've been listening to Spotify for many years now, so it "understands" me pretty well. I enjoy the "daylists" feature, which auto-generates some playlists based on things you've listened to in the past at different times of day. Sometimes it gets into some weird mixes and the titles are laughably absurd (in a good way); for a bit I was keeping track of them. One of the early titles it gave me was "coastal cowgirl pilates monday night". What even is that? There was also "anti-depression emotional tuesday afternoon". Now, these aren't actual reflection on the genre of music on the playlist (they give you a summary of what's in it in the description). But it's a fun feature of Spotify.

Contrary to common complaints about music streamers, these daylists tend to give me different music that I don't listen to, so not a lot of repeat tracks. They're useful for when I just want to throw something on apart from the radio.

I also think that Spotify's UI makes it a lot easier to add songs to playlists. A lot of actions seem to feel more natural compared to Apple Music. Maybe this is also a subjective thing and is a result of me being more familiar with Spotify. I don't know.

And the big one I mentioned before, my wife likes using Spotify. So why rock the boat? It's hard to break habits. Maybe if Spotify makes a catastrophic error down the road that breaks my wife's listening habits, we might consider a change; but until then I'm happy to continue with Spotify.

Reply by email   Share this post

Or if you prefer, find me on Mastodon.

#music #tech