Spotify vs. Apple Music Review – 2022 Edition

I guess the author doesn’t use windows because otherwise they would’ve acknowledged iTunes during the application and user experience section. I tolerate it since I only use windows for gaming but if windows was my main OS the app experience would be enough to choose Spotify.

My pet-peeves about Apple Music:

- Can't search for songs in my library. I can go to a playlist and search for a song, or I can go to search, choose "my library" and search for an artist, album or playlist, but not a song. Makes it difficult to go "I want to listen to that obscure cover of All Along The Watchtower I have in one of my playlists somewhere"

- No easy way to listen to a playlist on shuffle, starting from a specific song. You can search the playlist, but that limits you to shuffling the search results. You can scroll through your playlist until you find what you are looking for, but that is not easy.

- Do note that fixing this makes it difficult to easily listen to your favorite songs by artist. E.g, now you can go to "my fave songs" list and search for Michael Jackson, and voila, you have a temp playlist of all your favourite MJ songs!

- When creating a playlist, there are no "suggested songs"

- It is very difficult to listen to 1 song. Often I just want to listen to that song and nothing else.

Some life hacks for Apple Music:

There's a lot of stuff you can do on Apple Music on your Mac, that you can't do on your phone. for example, in a playlist you can choose when a song should start and end (so you can cut off an unnecessary intro, or "hidden track") and this will follow into your phone.

There’s no way to delete or modify your listening history on Apple Music, and thus no way to get rid of unwanted recommendations AFAIK. At least with Spotify you can just create a new account, but your Apple Music account is tied to your appleid, so that’s not really feasible if you’re a heavy Apple user. I just try to find the service with mostly the same features but with the least intrusive recommendations and use that, which at the moment is Qobuz.

I’m winding down my reliance on subscription based services. There’s been a noticeable shift in the world when it comes to ownership; specifically the media and housing market space. Perpetual renting seems to be the way of the future. While I have my own opinions on that, I think it’s important to (at the very least) own your media library. Not only does it benefit artists and studios more, you will not be subject to any drama. Streaming has done good things for the industry, but I think we’ve swung too far.

With that said, I own stacks blu rays and CD’s that can easily be imported into my NAS and then attached to servies like Plex[1] or Navidrome[2]. I can even share those libraries with friends and family which is an added bonus. Navidrome also exposes a subsonic api that clients can connect to. PlexAmp can also import your music library.

With the exception of Plex, I think we’re entering a golden age of open source software to allow this type of thing. Setting up these services is fairly straightforward and maintenance is also pretty easy.

Pure bliss.

[1]https://www.plex.tv

[2]https://www.navidrome.org

For every artist Spotify currently shows :

- Top 10 tracks.

- Artist posted playlist if any. (Only 1 is shown here, maybe the most popular one ?)

- Entire discography. (Singles, EPs, albums in chronological order)

- Spotify editorial playlists prominently featuring said artist.

- Merch.

- Bio.

- All artist posted playlists.

- Similar artists.

- Soundtracks or albums where the artist was featured.