Spotify has long been the champ of music streaming, but Apple Music is hot on its heels. Who's winning the battle between these two music streaming services?
As a music enthusiast, it’s no easy feat to choose between Spotify and Apple Music. Spotify currently has over 515 million users and 210 million Premium subscribers worldwide. Spotify offers a free tier option as well as a popular music-sharing experience. Apple Music was once the leader in all things digital music, but is currently behind Spotify with more than 98 million users worldwide.
There’s another area where Apple Music has a leg up on its competition: integration of the iTunes library. Any music you have — whether previously purchased via the iTunes Store, ripped from a physical CD, or uploaded to iTunes Match — will appear in your Apple Music library, giving you the option to freely browse your own music alongside Apple’s standard catalog.
Section winner: Apple Music Apple Music Related Music discovery With so many songs at the ready, streaming libraries can seem daunting for those who want to find new music. Let's take a look at how the big players do it.Spotify provides a lot of useful tools for finding new songs to suit your taste. Personalized playlists like Discover Weekly provide fantastic opportunities for subscribers to latch on to new music from artists they never stumbled across on their own.
Thankfully, once the process is complete, Apple Music does a great job of curating playlists to appeal to your preferences, so you can vibe out through your headphones. Playlists might be based on genre, artist, or even a particular activity like driving. Apple claims the playlists are curated by a “team of experts.” This cabal of tastemakers — whoever they are — do a good job creating varied playlists that are at once familiar yet fresh, like a mixtape you might get from a friend.
Section winner: Spotify Music Spotify Music Radio In the app, Spotify did away with the Radio tab of the past but now has an option to create a radio mode for any specific artist, album, playlist, or song. Simply go to the Three-dot menu icon, and choose Go to radio to create one. These radio “stations” can also be saved in the library as playlists.
Beyond Apple Music 1, Apple Music has some more generic radio stations for those who simply want to listen to, say, classic rock, jazz, or Top 40 hits. There are also non-music stations, such as BBC News and ESPN, creating a menagerie of options that are hard to beat. Section winner: Spotify Music Spotify Music How much are they? As of July 2023, Spotify increased the price of all of its service tiers. The Spotify Premium Individual service now costs $11 per month and is now on par with Apple Music.
Section winner: Spotify Music Spotify Music User interface and mobile experience Apple Music’s mobile interface is minimalist and easy to use. The Library contains all the music you own and can be accessed in this tab, and you can easily filter by Playlists, Artists, Albums, Songs, and Downloaded music, just in case you don’t want to waste your precious mobile data.
Spotify, on the other hand, is more device-agnostic and has long been the industry leader in terms of sheer usability. The mobile and desktop applications provide users with an easy way to browse music, access playlists, listen to internet radio, and discover new music. Apple Music offers one of the most impressive music services around, but you have to be all-in on Apple’s smartphones, tablets, computers, and streaming boxes to get the most out of it. We give Spotify the edge here for its clean and easy user experience, ubiquity, and increased availability of third-party integrations.
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