Apple Music vs. Spotify

The long-waited debate of Apple Music vs Spotify has arrived. I have been a user of both Apple Music and Spotify and here is my review over both apps and the pros and cons of each. I took five separate areas to focus on. Apple Music and Spotify both have the same concept of online music streaming for users. One difference is that you can still use Spotify if you are not a Premium owner. You just use your desktop or laptop to download songs and they will download to your app and account. For the sake of argument, I compared Apple Music and Spotify Premium.

1. Price

The monthly price for Apple Music and Spotify Premium is the same for regular users and both have a student discount price. This was nice because I did not have to determine which app to use based on price. I was able to fully compare the apps solely on how they operate and function.

2. Discovering New Music

Spotify updates their section of music catered to your taste of music for you to discover new music. “Discover Weekly” usually left me disappointed in the new music that they were giving me. I would find one to five songs that I thoroughly enjoyed and wanted to listen to more than once. They created daily mixes for you as well that take your music and create a playlist from that. I was not a fan of using this platform for finding new music.

Apple Music updates their “For You” music section twice a week. On Sundays, they create different playlists tailoring to your mood of music. I have gotten all different kinds of playlists, and then they also give you three to four other playlists that are updated daily by the Apple Music workers. On Fridays, Apple Music gives you a “Just For You” playlist that is updated by the other music you listen to. Per week, I can find seven to fifteen new songs that I enjoy. I have discovered an extreme amount of new music from this section. You will always be finding new music through Apple Music

3. Charts and Numbers

One thing that Spotify has that Apple Music does not is the numbers and stats. I really enjoyed seeing the stats and using these as reference when booking bands for a venue. Apple Music does not give you this option and just puts songs in the order of most popular. It doesn’t give a frame of reference for number of followers as well. This just doesn’t help anyone who is trying to do research on a band or artists when referencing popularity. Spotify is an extremely useful tool when trying to look at music statistics for artists and bands.

4. Organization

Spotify and Apple Music are set up in similar ways, which made this topic easier for me to point out flaws that I personally experienced. One key difference for the organizational part that I did not like about Spotify was that you could download songs, but they did not save to a database where all songs are saved, and you could just press shuffle and play all your songs. To do this, you must save all the songs to the song data base, and then you must go through to find a specific artist or band, and it was all just too much work for my taste.

Apple Music is very clear cut and precise when organizing your music. You can create playlists, but as soon as you download a song, it is put into both the song data base and the artist data base and it does the organizing for you. I prefer Apple Music’s organization, just because I forget about a lot of music that enjoy with Spotify because I forget where I saved it to sometimes.

5. Streaming Quality

Overall, there isn’t too much of a difference in streaming quality between the two apps, so that was not a deal breaker for me when deciding which app to use for listening to music on the daily.

All in all, I prefer Apple music due to the tailoring of the music I like, and the organizational aspects. Both are wonderful platforms to stream music and support your favorite artists and bands.

If you have any other suggestions for me, let me know! Hope you enjoyed this. Make sure to support your local music scene ALWAYS and let the world know your favorite music. Let me know what music you want me to review next!

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