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Apple Music on Track to Overtake Spotify in U.S. Subscribers

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Re: Apple Music on Track to Overtake Spotify in U.S. Subscribers

#151

Post by adim86 »

rahoulb wrote: post #139

I tried Apple Music for 6 months, and spent that time diligently training it to my tastes. My latest "favourites mix" had 12 songs that I had to mark as "dislike" after all that training. Likewise the "for you"playlists are garbage - just because I like a couple of songs by guitar bands doesn't mean I want to listen to hours and hours of them. Apple Music on Apple Watch 3 is amazing - leaving a phone at home is stran…

I totally agree with this sentiment. The auto-generated lists on Apple music suck compared to Spotify. I do think the curated stuff on Apple music is formidable but that's about it. For people who want to discover music...spotify is still the way to go. Apple is just really good at shoving their stuff on people. Spotify has no ecosystem to leverage like apple

Re: Apple Music on Track to Overtake Spotify in U.S. Subscribers

#152

Post by Axsuul »

AndrewUnmuted wrote: post #97
Axsuul wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're talking like Spotify's days are numbered. Spotify has many ways it can outcompete Apple on, not just budget. Just like Lyft did with Uber, DuckDuckGo with Google, etc. This is not a winner-takes-all market. What Apple has done here is they've captured their ecosystem users that likely would have never signed up with Spotify in the first place.

No, this also shows that Apple has successfully yanked users out of Spotify. Not surprising in the least. The fact is: the music industry is indeed a winner-take-all market now. The industry's horrible response to Napster crippled them, and their inability to outmaneuver Steve Jobs in the aftermath led to a rather diminished industry overall. We see this in both recorded and live music - just look at LiveNation's ris…

> No, this also shows that Apple has successfully yanked users out of Spotify. Not surprising in the least.

Not quite sure about this. Spotify is still growing and adding more users than ever. If Apple were seriously making a dent in Spotify's user base, we would've seen it affect their growth rate. Not everyone is in the Apple ecosystem--an overwhelming majority aren't. In the end, who makes the better product here? Spotify has way more clients, a better product, completely focused on being a music platform, and still carries the coolness factor between the two. There is a lot of incentive for a consumer who is deep within the Apple ecosystem to sign up for Apple music. On the contrary, in the free market, I'd argue Spotify wins out hands down.

> Music also suffers from the same problem as other older media - competition for ears and for time. Video games are hurting music just as much as it's hurting film. Music consumption has become cheapened over the years as technology left it in the dust, preferring to adapt video to our current media-heavy lives. Audio mediums have been traditionally not as paid attention to. Our culture is simply moving on from this kind of media, in a sense.

Music is typically a passive form of media (often playing in the background while work is done) therefore there are not very many mediums that can compete on that; movies, video games require you to be actively engaged with them. You can listen to music while playing games! Music is here to stay.

Re: Apple Music on Track to Overtake Spotify in U.S. Subscribers

#153

Post by scarface74 »

Axsuul wrote: post #146
scarface74 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotify still isn't profitable. It's hard to make your whole business around something that larger companies (Apple, Google, Amazon) see as just a feature.

What does that say about who makes the better product if larger companies just see it as a feature?

It depends. You may be able to find better features from a company that specializes but the integration a company can provide with its feature may make it better. For instance, Apple can seamlessly combine a person's iTunes library of bought music dating back to 2003, with thier ripped music and their subscription music.

Re: Apple Music on Track to Overtake Spotify in U.S. Subscribers

#154

Post by [deleted] »

adim86 wrote: post #151
rahoulb wrote: post #139

I tried Apple Music for 6 months, and spent that time diligently training it to my tastes. My latest "favourites mix" had 12 songs that I had to mark as "dislike" after all that training. Likewise the "for you"playlists are garbage - just because I like a couple of songs by guitar bands doesn't mean I want to listen to hours and hours of them. Apple Music on Apple Watch 3 is amazing - leaving a phone at home is stran…

I totally agree with this sentiment. The auto-generated lists on Apple music suck compared to Spotify. I do think the curated stuff on Apple music is formidable but that's about it. For people who want to discover music...spotify is still the way to go. Apple is just really good at shoving their stuff on people. Spotify has no ecosystem to leverage like apple

[deleted]

Re: Apple Music on Track to Overtake Spotify in U.S. Subscribers

#155

Post by yeahdef »

thirdsun wrote: post #134
yeahdef wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another perspective: I am less concerned with music discovery or seamless device hand-offs. I know what I want to listen to. As a former club DJ, I accrued a large amount of records that are simply unavailable via streaming networks. I recently starting ripping a lot of those vinyl records to mp3. I have tried spotify, google play music, and Apple Music. Apple Music is the clear winner when it comes to the importing,…

Why would you rip your collection to a lossy format like MP3? Sure, you're probably going to explain how you don't hear a difference which is fair, but a lossless format like FLAC or ALAC (recommended if you're in the Apple eco system) has other advantages besides superior audio quality. It allows you to convert to any other format, including MP3, at a later point. Storage is cheap these days and there's really no ex…

Fair reasoning from the archival master standpoint. I share a lot of what I rip with other DJ friends. If I sent them a FLAC or ALAC file, they would respond "what the hell is this? how do i listen to this?". mp3 is ubiquitous and 320 kbps does the trick for me. I hope I don't feel that sting of regret you mention, but my gut feeling is that I will not. I still have the records themselves on the shelf which should last longer than the harddrives :)

Re: Apple Music on Track to Overtake Spotify in U.S. Subscribers

#156

Post by gurkendoktor »

rahoulb wrote: post #139

I tried Apple Music for 6 months, and spent that time diligently training it to my tastes. My latest "favourites mix" had 12 songs that I had to mark as "dislike" after all that training. Likewise the "for you"playlists are garbage - just because I like a couple of songs by guitar bands doesn't mean I want to listen to hours and hours of them. Apple Music on Apple Watch 3 is amazing - leaving a phone at home is stran…

> the big advantage of Spotify is I don't always need to think about what I want to listen to

This is huge when I'm trying to stay in the flow while programming. Spotify is like a personal DJ that really groks how I work, especially now that it silently continues playing matching tracks when a playlist ends.

With Apple Music, I ended up switching back to iTunes at least once an hour. I really hope they won't be able to crush Spotify.

Re: Apple Music on Track to Overtake Spotify in U.S. Subscribers

#157

Post by gurkendoktor »

Trav5 wrote: post #101
askafriend wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IT blocks Spotify? That's just bizarre. I would personally quit working at any place that tried to infantilize employees by blocking sites like that.

My guess would be that IT would block streaming to reduce load and/or internet connection cost. Especially if you have a lot of people in the building.

A quick google search says that Spotify is using 144 MB/h for high-quality streaming[1] (premium only), so that's roughly 1 GB per person per working day. That's quite a bit - without Spotify, I burn through roughly 500 MB per day when working.

[1] https://thomas.vanhoutte.be/miniblog/spotify-data-consumptio...

Re: Apple Music on Track to Overtake Spotify in U.S. Subscribers

#158

Post by ScottBurson »

yeahdef wrote: post #155
thirdsun wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you rip your collection to a lossy format like MP3? Sure, you're probably going to explain how you don't hear a difference which is fair, but a lossless format like FLAC or ALAC (recommended if you're in the Apple eco system) has other advantages besides superior audio quality. It allows you to convert to any other format, including MP3, at a later point. Storage is cheap these days and there's really no ex…

Fair reasoning from the archival master standpoint. I share a lot of what I rip with other DJ friends. If I sent them a FLAC or ALAC file, they would respond "what the hell is this? how do i listen to this?". mp3 is ubiquitous and 320 kbps does the trick for me. I hope I don't feel that sting of regret you mention, but my gut feeling is that I will not. I still have the records themselves on the shelf which should la…

When I ripped my LP collection I first saved each recording out as FLAC (16 bits @ 48kHz), then re-exported it as VBR MP3. Audacity (a Mac recording app) makes this easy. I keep the FLAC files on my home server for future use (or for when 1TB microSD cards become cheap :-).

Re: Apple Music on Track to Overtake Spotify in U.S. Subscribers

#159

Post by hellweaver666 »

sgustard wrote: post #109
sanjeetsuhag wrote: post #10

Honestly, I can't imagine switching to Apple Music. Speaking as a guy who owns an iPhone and a Mac. I love being able to smoothly control playback from any device. I love how seamless the experience is, I've only tried the Apple Music Trial when it first came out and I can't see any possible reason to switch to it now. Spotify is excellent for music discovery, and I love the top songs and everything. It's perfect. It…

I live in a fully Mac/iOS household, and I had no idea until I saw this article that Apple Music was a thing that competes with Spotify. That's probably due to iTunes and iCloud being such a confusing mess that I just don't use Apple services and I haven't launched those apps in years.

It is indeed a mess. After sharing an iCloud account for years my wife and I decided to upgrade our Apple Music to a family account so we could have separate music (and listen to music on different devices at the same time). Apple decided this must mean we also want separate iCloud accounts and upon logging into her own Apple Music account, also proceeded to remove our 15 years of family photos and a couple of years of shared notes from her device. Now she can't see the photos I've taken or any of her old photos unless we use the sharing functionality (we take a lot of photos of our kids and having them auto sync on both devices was brilliant for us). We tried doing it the manual way but it was such a pain.

Since Apple music's family service wasn't compatible with how we use our devices, we cancelled Apple Music and got a family account on Spotify instead. When Apple Music expired it wiped all the playlists we had in iTunes including ones I created years before Apple Music was ever a thing and not even containing any music from Apple Music.

I'm thinking of also dumping iCloud, but I really like the automatic backing up of all our photos to all of our devices. Heck, at this point I would switch to Android as well if it weren't for the years of apps I've purchased for Apple and don't want to buy again.

Re: Apple Music on Track to Overtake Spotify in U.S. Subscribers

#160

Post by ancarda »

MarkMc wrote: post #147

Can someone explain why? Does Apple music have significantly more songs? Is it significantly cheaper? Or is it simply because it's the default music app on iPhone?

The sole reason I use Spotify is it’s fantastic (community created) playlists and great recommendations. Once Apple Music catches up to that, I may switch to it because Spotify’s UI is truly awful.

I want to go back to Apple Music. I only left because someone showed me some amazing playlists and pretty soon Spotify started recommending great songs to me.

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