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Ask HN: Spotify vs Apple Music?

18 points by _august ↗ HN
I thought I'd give Apple Music a try after the recent Spotify-Rogan-Young debacle. Overall, I'm finding the experience to be pretty good, however these small things are really quite annoying when coming from Spotify:

* Mac Music app & iPhone App don't sync up what's currently playing. So, I can't control it from my phone while playing from my laptop.

* No Liked/Loved Songs playlist that automatically adds songs I've "loved".

* Loving songs should be an icon on desktop app, not a 2-click thru a drop-down.

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On the flipside, things I like:

* Easily access recently played history

* Seemingly better sound quality

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What are your pro / cons?

19 comments

[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 78.4 ms ] thread
Gigachad
The Apple Music web app was just flat out broken and unusable when I tried it about a year ago. Like you would click play and a totally different song on the page would start playing. And then the discovery features sucked on AM. Switched to Spotify and have been very happy since.
veilrap
Spotify has better cross-platform support.

Apple Music's music upload is great for combining a personal/niche library with the cloud subscription library.

Spotify's music "experience" might still be marginally better, but I feel like things haven't improved, and probably have been trending downwards in favor of podcasts.

Apple Music seems like it's been getting gradually better over time.

Both have download to device support which is nice.

davidkuennen
I don't know Apple Music. All I can say is that the recommendations in Spotify are perfect. Seriously, they are so good I end up adding 90% to my playlist. Sometimes I don't even know if I'm still listening to my playlist or Spotifies recommendations based on my playlist.
atmosx
One thing Apple Music has over Spotify is that Apple Music allows me to sync sound multi-room using Modipy[1]. It's not a big thing for most people, but it's one of the reasons I'll most likely switch.

[1]: https://mopidy.com/

369548684892826
I do this with Spotify and it was one of the reasons I would stick with them over moving to Apple Music! I'm using librespot and snapcast, I didn't realise Mopidy had multiroom built in.

edit: I've searched, but I can't work out how you're doing music sync with Apple Music and mopidy

Rodeoclash
I'm going to slightly hijack this Ask HN.

Aside from Apple Music, what other streaming music options are available? I'm aware of Tidal which I'll likely switch to shortly unless someone can suggest something better.

I miss Rdio :(

Gigachad
Youtube Music. (If that's still the current name for it)
leokennis
Qobuz is nice. It’s built for what I’d call the old cd collectors crowd. Lots of liner notes and high res art, lots of classical, supports buying music including “hi res lossless”.
schmorptron
Deezer exists, although I don't know if they have any differentiating features.
starwind
I really like Tidal. High quality streams, good recommendations and playlists, and solid app. I had some problems with Spotify, and I never got used to Apple Music's interface on Android
NaughtyShiba
cons: plenty of music I listen to, isn’t on there :/

pros: better quality. doesn’t matter for airpods, but that’s bluetooth issue

leokennis
As long as you listen on only your iPhone (or iPad), I prefer AM. Spotify has better recommendations but their treatment of what music is, is like how Instagram treats photography or Amazon treats books.

There’s just no love for music as Spotify; it’s more an engine designed to maximize your engagement with their pool of content.

No one at Spotify would give a shit about a new Beatles remaster or about celebrating the work of a recently deceased artist or whatever - unless it would push the dial on their “DAU metric” or “engagement dashboard”.

Meanwhile AM seems at least interested in making you enjoy the marvel that is music and have you appreciate its cultural impact.

We should rightfully be very skeptical about Apple’s earnestness or ethics when it comes to hard to measure things like “privacy” or “taste”. But I remain convinced that there is still some influence of Steve Jobs and Jimmy Iovine etc. at Apple Music.

karmakaze
One thing I don't like about all these remastered tracks is that the original tracks stop being listed. The remastered ones sound more 'modern' with a clean production. For much of what I like to listen to, I don't like them. The originals had more character and didn't all sound 'well produced'. I'll gladly take a bit of noise or lower production value to preserve the original character.
batiudrami
Yup, I switched about six months back because of the persistence of optimising for engagement by Spotify was eroding the experience of listening to music. I just want to be able to view a list of albums I have added to my library, by artist and release year, along with seeing an searched artist’s wider discography to listen and/or add to my library or playlists.

When Spotify first launched it was pretty good but honestly almost everything they have added or changed ever since had made it a worse product for my use case, and so I have finally left.

md5wasp
You can have an automatically updated playlist of likes using smart playlists. You have to create it one time on desktop, but it’s automatic after that.

https://www.idownloadblog.com/2018/12/19/create-smart-playli...

I’m an insane person so I listen to all my liked songs on shuffle and ride the wave of tonal inconsistency, so this feature is very important to me…

owly
Spotify definitely has the better recommendation engine. AM has much better quality. I’ve only come across a few artists not available on AM. I only use AM on mobile, so haven’t compared desktop or cross platform. Obviously AM is favoring iPhone users.
sdevonoes
Am I the only one who downloads mp3s from youtube directly? My needs are rather simple: listen music from my mp3 player/phone (so I don't need to sync anything).
culopatin
I have a “liked songs” playlist that collects all the songs I’ve put a heart on, are you talking about a different feature I’m not aware of?