Why I Switched from Spotify to Apple Music
It’s more than politics
I was a Spotify Premium subscriber from June 2016 up until Sept 2021, when I switched to Apple Music. Even if I had not made the move back then, I probably would’ve now. (I stand with Neil Young.) But at the time I had a lot of other reasons to make the switch. My apologies to users or potential users of other services like Google Play, Tidal or Amazon Music, but I have had little to no experience with those and can’t comment. Spotify and Apple Music are the two that best integrate with my listening habits, from what I can tell.
iTunes Library Syncing
Chief among those reasons is that I have an exceedingly large iTunes library: over 61,000 tracks and rising. Most of those are rips from my personal CD collection of over 4000 discs from mainly the 80s and 90s — a project that is a work in progress for more than a decade. There’s also quite a large number of purchased audio files I acquired over the years from the likes of eMusic, Bandcamp, HDTracks, 7Digital, AmieStreet (anyone remember AmieStreet?), etc. These days I predominately stream music and I don’t usually purchase any unless I am making a point of supporting the artist or if I can’t resist a physical collector’s edition. My collecting/hoarding tendencies spread to my digital life and were getting out of control. But that’s a subject for another story.
Anyway, the fact that Apple Music would suck in my entire library, including tracks that didn’t already exist in Apple Music, and make it available to me on all my devices was extremely appealing. It also has the additional benefit of making the service aware of my tastes on a grand scale so that their algorithms can tailor music suggestions to me with laser fine precision. When it plays music I’ve never heard, I’m almost guaranteed that it will be in my wheelhouse, except sometimes in the curated weekly New Music Mix.
You can upload your personal collection to Spotify as well, but the process is more clunky and not easy to do on a mass scale. Apple Music will match your tracks with ones in its library, and will only upload the ones that it can’t find a match for. Yes, this process sometimes doesn’t work real well and I wound up with some strange anomalies, but that’s the price I pay. It also took an incredibly long time for it to upload my huge library (we’re talking weeks), but I have a slow internet connection with limited bandwidth. I suspect it was also converting MP3 files to AAC on the fly when uploading, which takes even more time.
I was never able to generate much of a library in Spotify since it’s such a manual process there, so the automatic nature of the iTunes track matching in Apple Music really helped me there.
I do realize that I’m an outlier on this and that having a massive pre-existing music collection is not a consideration for 99% of people subscribing to a streaming music service. But hey, I’m quirky that way. I can not overstate how wonderful it is to have my humongous library available like this. It is so satisfying to hit that play button in the Music app on my iPhone and have some totally random thing either surface from my library or from the “Here’s something you may not have never heard but should like” AI subroutine.
Spatial Audio
Apple Music has Spatial Audio (aka Dolby Atmos) and Spotify doesn’t. My thoughts on Spatial Audio are prolific and deserve a post of their own. Suffice it to say that it’s interesting but non-essential for headphone listening, but it can be pretty spectacular on an Apple TV connected to a surround sound system. I’m probably still pretty much an outlier on this, but I do think it’s something most people would get into it if they had the proper equipment and gave it a chance. Apple must think it’s a good selling point, since they’re sinking a lot of effort into it.
Lossless and Hi-Rez Audio
This is an even more complicated and divisive feature than Spatial Audio. At some point, I will go into detail about my relationship to it. For now, I’ll just say that I fall somewhere between the “It’s total snake oil!” camp and the “I can totally hear the difference!” audiophiles. (Don’t get me started on vinyl.) I am glad that they have it for people who want it, and it’s another thing they have over Spotify. Though keep in mind that you can’t (presently) listen to Lossless audio on Bluetooth headphones/earphones. Listening methods are somewhat limited. I suspect this will be changing soon in the Apple ecosystem.
Catalog
Apple Music supposedly has more tracks than Spotify, though I have never really encountered much of a difference between them. Spotify does have my band’s lone album¹ and AM does not, but I think that’s my fault. Spotify has podcasts, including exclusive ones they pay for, but we’ve seen how that can be problematic. I prefer to keep podcasts separate from my music engagement, so in my opinion it is just adding clutter to Spotify.
User Interface
Spotify might actually get the nod here, though the two are pretty similar. Not great, but functional. The one thing that drives me batty about Apple Music is how you can’t just mark an album as Save for Later like you can by Liking it in Spotify. I can add an album to a playlist in AM, but it’s unwieldy and it doesn’t even put the songs in the correct order. I can add an album to my library instead of a playlist, but there’s no way to mark it as “listen to this” and then it mostly just sits there and I forget about it.
Personalized Curation
Both services have personalized playlists that get changed up every week. Spotify has Release Radar (new music) and Discover Weekly (tracks from any old time it thinks I might like), both of which are usually pretty decent. Apple Music has New Music Mix (which, despite knowing my tastes from my library, manages to not hit the target some of the time). But it also has Get Up! Mix (energetic songs) which I listen to quite often, and Chill Mix (downbeat songs) which I’m usually not in the mood for, and Favorites Mix, which depends too much on remembering to mark songs as Favorites and repeating songs you’ve already played a lot². But to me where AM really has the edge, as I mentioned above, is that you can just hit Play (or your personal Station) and it will dole out random stuff from your library mixed in with other things it thinks you might like. I like that a lot and Spotify really doesn’t have that, as far as I can tell. You can play the Liked Songs playlist on shuffle, but it doesn’t add in anything from the outside. It has a number of “Mixes” with random stuff from your library and without, but those are usually split up by genre or similar artist or whatever. Apple Music has that too, and it’s not something I’m that fond of. It’s rare that I want to listen to a bunch of songs from similar artists at the same time. But again, I’m probably weird that way.
Lyrics And Visualizations
Spotify and Apple Music both will display lyrics for a song if they have them, which is often the case. Both will also sometimes scroll the lyrics along with the music so you can see just what is being sung at the exact time you’re hearing it. This is very cool. Spotify has a little more control over how the lyrics are displayed - you can do a half screen display that you can’t do on Apple Music. Spotify also has their Canvas feature which will show a short looping visual on a track if available, but that loses its appeal quickly. I think Apple Music has something similar, but I believe it’s rare and only appears on very high profile releases?
Cost
They’re basically the same: $9.99/month. However, you can bundle Apple Music with other Apple services via Apple One and get something of a discount depending on how you look at it and how much use you get out of the other services. I love Apple TV+, for example.
Wrapping It Up
Though there is probably more, I’ve hit the main points that prompted me to switch, and I can wholeheartedly recommend Apple Music as a Spotify alternative. In all honesty, I did succumb to Spotify’s “Please please please come back and we’ll charge you just $9.99 for three months” pleas, but that was before the latest controversy and I will most likely just not renew (at the full price) after the three months. And again, this is just based on my own personal experiences and the way I listen to music. YMMV. If you disagree or if I said something wrong, let me know in the comments!
Update: I’ve published a review of one of the many apps that interface with Apple Music and can act as a replacement for Apple’s Music app: Albums.
¹ True, I have not actually removed my band’s album from Spotify as yet, which is probably hypocritical, but I have my reasons. 1) I’m not actually clear how to do it, since I’m not completely sure how it got there in the first place, 2) I haven’t checked with the other band members about how they would feel about it, and 3) Losing 1 or 2 listens a week is not going to make Spotify change its mind about anything.
² Both services have a problem I call the “Unwanted Artist Feedback Loop”. This will happen when you sometimes accidentally play a song you don’t like, or one will get suggested to you. If you don’t immediately do a “dislike” on it (something that’s not even really possible on Spotify), then the service will keep suggesting that artist and others like them. This can also happen if you allow other people access to your phone or to your account on a voice assistant box or whatever. Visitors to my house must be educated to not request undesirable material on my Amazon Echo.
