Spotify vs. Apple iPhone Music

Music. Most of us listen to music all the time, most likely every day. Music is what keeps us going. It has the power of helping us get through long days and grueling, monotonous tasks. Music can take us to places, or make us feel right at home. Music can bring memories, whether good or bad, and it can help us express our feelings in ways that simple talking cannot express as effectively. Therefore, it would make sense to be able to enjoy our music to the fullest extent possible, right?

In today’s modern world, we have a variety of music sources and players at our fingertips. We have iTunes, Google Play Music, Apple Music, Pandora Radio, iHeart Radio, Spotify, and so many more. Recently, I decided to try out Spotify, after using iTunes to purchase and listen to music for over seven years. As awesome as iTunes is, I grew tired of purchasing every single song I wanted to listen to. Spotify seemed like an enticing option, given that it allows its users to pay a flat rate of $10 per month, and download as many songs onto their device as possible. No longer would I need to pay for individual songs, since that could get expensive, and I would always have to be thoughtful about which songs I bought.

With that being said, following this paragraph is my review of the Spotify iPhone app, written through the lens of Steven Bradley’s Smashing Magazine article, “Designing for a Hierarchy of Needs.” I will look at five aspects of the Spotify app — creativity, proficiency, usability, reliability, and functionality. Finally, I will then compare the Spotify app to Apple’s iPhone Music app, which is what I previously used. I will rate each of the aforementioned design hierarchy needs on a scale of 1 to 3, with 1 being awful, and 3 being excellent.

Functionality — 3

First off, Spotify does very well in the functionality department. Their purpose as an iPhone app goes as follows “Spotify is the best way to listen to music on mobile or tablet. Search for any track, artist or album and listen for free. Make and share playlists. Build your biggest, best ever music collection.” Their mobile app achieves these goals very well. Just download the app, then sign in, and then you are ready to listen to whichever song you’d like, for free. If you don’t like seeing the ads and having them interrupt your music, you could subscribe for $10 to Spotify, which gives you a Premium account. Put simply, Spotify was created to be a music player, and that is exactly what it does. More specifically, with Spotify, the user can play, pause, rewind, forward, skip back and forth, shuffle, and repeat music. Therefore, Spotify certainly meets the basic functionality needs.

Reliability — 3

In terms of reliability, Spotify also hits the nail on the head in this department. I have used this app for just over a week no, and I have had no issues with the app working at all. Music plays without a hitch. Changing from one song to another, or skipping songs, is an easy, hitch-less process. I have not encountered an instance in which this app froze, or stuttered mid-song (like the iPhone’s Music app has a couple of times), whether streaming songs, or playing them straight from my phone. Everything has worked flawlessly. If I desire to add a new song to my playlist, I can easily do that, and it will sync the change with all other devices on my Spotify account. App loading speeds are also quite speedy, consistently so. There is a total of 5 tabs within the app: “Home,” “Browse,” “Search,” “Radio,” and “Your Library,” all of which load in a timely manner.

Usability — 2

While Spotify is pretty easy to use, there is one aspect of this app that hinders usability slightly. Upon opening the app, the user lands on the “Home” page, in which they are shown recently played songs, suggested playlists, concerts nearby them, and such. This page changes often depending on which songs the user listens to. The problem with the Home page is that it is rather unnecessary to be the first page to land on. In my personal opinion, when I open the app, I immediately want to go to my library. Yes, there is a tab called “Your Library,” which is easy enough to navigate to, however, you have to navigate to it for the first time that you use the app. An extra click is required just to see your own playlists, yet all of the content that is on the Home page, a.k.a. stuff you probably don’t really care about, is right in your face. It might sound ridiculous, but this extra click makes a difference, even if you only have to do this for the first time you use the app. What’s nice about the iPhone Music app is that you are immediately brought to your library. All of your content is right there. Apple really has convenience nailed down.

Proficiency — 3

Spotify truly masters proficiency with their mobile app. With just a couple of taps, the user can add songs to a playlist of their choice, and it will not only appear there, but it will show up on all devices connected to their account. What’s more, the song will even download on the device if the user has the “download” toggle activated for the playlist. Once it is toggled, any new songs will automatically download on the device. The user can choose whether the songs download over mobile data or not, If they wish to conserve their usage and avoid overage charges. Spotify also makes a plethora of recommendations. While I don’t utilize them, and find them rather unnecessary, Spotify shows you concerts that artists in your playlists are performing, and it shows you other playlists based on what you listen to. Spotify is the master of recommendations. Users can browse the charts and see what the most popular songs are, and they can also listen to the variety of genre radio stations that the app offers, if they grow tired of their own music. In the end, Spotify is definitely a proficient app.

Creativity — 2

Spotify is definitely not the highest-ranking in terms of creativity. Its design is beautiful; however, it is relatively bare-bones when it comes to being creative. There is no customization of the way the app looks; the only customizing a user can do is to songs on their playlist. That’s about it. It is useful that the app can act like a remote control, though. If you link your phone and computer Spotify accounts, for example, you can change, pause, and play the song on your computer using your phone. You can even adjust the volume, just like with a real remote. Pretty cool. However, this is about as far as the app goes in terms of creativity. Not much to see here.

With a total score of 13 out of 15, Spotify ranks highly overall. In a broad sense, I like this app a lot. Although it may not be perfect in terms of usability and creativity, it is a very pleasant app to use. I am able to easily listen to high quality music on a consistent basics, with no worries about the app crashing or lagging/stuttering during songs. If I get bored with my own music, I can easily check out more songs. An app like this does not necessarily need to be creative. It just needs to work, and that’s exactly what Spotify does well. In fact, very well.

Now, we will turn the attention to the app that I previously used — Apple’s iPhone Music app — and we will see how it fared in my rankings.

Functionality — 2

Overall, the Music app is functional. Like any other music app, it allows the user to play and pause music, go forward, go backwards, turn the volume up and down. The user can create playlists, and change the order of them as they please. Upon clicking on a song, it starts to play. It is easy for users to sync songs of their choice to their phone: just add them to iTunes, add them to a playlist, select the playlist to be synced with their phone, and voila! The songs appear on the phone. Songs can also be bought from the iTunes Store app on the phone itself, and brought into the playlist from there. But where this app falters involves two minute but important features: the shuffle and repeat buttons. There is no repeat button throughout this app at all, and the shuffle button can only be used before starting to play the playlist. One cannot engage or disengage this feature while playing a song, nor can they set songs to repeat. This is rather basic functionality, which Apple decided to remove from their app.

Reliability — 2

In terms of reliability, I also encountered some problems. Overall, this app is trustworthy, but there have been a few times when my music skipped. A few updates ago, the app even skipped over songs completely. This was around the time when the iPhone 7, as well as iOS 10, came out. Thankfully, Apple has worked out most of the bugs, but that does not make it okay to release updates that cause these kinds of issues in the first place. So, this app could definitely benefit from some reliability improvements.

Usability — 1

Much like Spotify, Music does suffer from usability issues — but worse. In a broad sense, the app is easy to use, and most people should not have a problem with it, however, some of its tabs are confusing. There is a “For You” tab, as well as a “Browse” tab, both of which are for Apple Music, yet they are in 2 different tabs. That is not necessary at all. Hold on, did I say 2? There are actually 3 different tabs; “Radio” is also connected to Apple music. And then, within the search tab, there is an option to search for songs in Apple Music. Put simply, 4 out of the 5 total tabs in this app promote Apple Music. Apple, you’re trying too hard. The user has to go into the iPhone Settings app to be able to hide Apple Music, and even then, pieces of Apple Music still are scattered throughout the App. Once again, Apple, you’re trying too hard.

Proficiency — 2

This app is rather bare-bones. Aside from Apple Music’s many pages, there is really not music to this app. Just playlists, and your music library. No fancy remote feature, no ability to add songs into your playlist and immediately see the changes on other devices. Apple typically goes for a more simple approach, and this is evident in the way they programmed this app. On a more positive note, this can be a good thing, because the whole purpose of this app is to listen to music. That is a purpose which it fulfills, and fulfills fairly well.

Creativity — 1.5

There is not much to see here when it comes to creativity either. The only thing the user can really create are playlists, and customize them. There is nothing fancy about this app, and I personally think that the “Library” categories are in much too big of a font. In previous versions of the app, everything was sized perfectly, but now, unnecessarily large fonts certainly don’t make the app look good. It’s not terrible, it just could be a whole lot better.

Apple’s Music app gets a total of 8.5 out of 13 on the design hierarchy. This score is noticeably lower than that of Spotify, and I would say that this is a strong representation of how good both apps are. Spotify, I have concluded, is a much better app. That does not mean that Apple’s Music app is bad, however, it just isn’t as good. In the process of updating the app, Apple did more of a downgrade, both appearance-wise, and functionality-wise, but especially the former.

For the sake of enjoying my music to the fullest, I will have to stick with Spotify.