Apple Music vs Spotify

[flyinghaggis]

I use Spotify all the time but wondered whether anyone on here had tried out the free trial of Apple Music? How does it compare and is it worth switching to over Spotify? Edited July 15, 2015 by flyinghaggis

[bossman]

@flyinghaggis

 

Why not try it for the free trial and you will find out for yourself first hand, other people may not have the same opinion of it as you, I would think this is the best way forward don't you?

 

Personally I prefer Spotify to which I pay £10 per month for a product that I have used for the past 4 years without any issues.

[Quackers]

I only ever tried the free version of Spotify on my iPhone (a couple of times) but i could never get on with it, hated it, so i always went back to buying tracks and using iTunes. I love Apple Music though, its basically all of iTunes of a monthly fee with some curation.

[nikaso]

If they did the free version of spotify on phones where you could skip tracks it would be awesome, not being able to is maddening but then I suppose you get what you pay for!

[LosOjos]

I only ever tried the free version of Spotify on my iPhone (a couple of times) but i could never get on with it, hated it, so i always went back to buying tracks and using iTunes. I love Apple Music though, its basically all of iTunes of a monthly fee with some curation.

 

If they did the free version of spotify on phones where you could skip tracks it would be awesome, not being able to is maddening but then I suppose you get what you pay for!

 

It's not really a fair comparison, Free Spotify - iTunes.

 

Personally, I thought Spotify was really good on subscription.

 

That said, on my ageing Android phone, Deezer app works better and has almost everything Spotify has, plus much better generated playlists, which I liked for finding new music.

 

Haven't used iTunes so can't comment there.

 

What I would say is that there are dozens of streaming services, almost all offer a free trial and have varied catalogues. Depending on the style of music you listen to, you may well find one service has much more to your taste than the next. Try them all!

[Shadow_Walker]

I just signed up for the 3 month trial with apple music and it is very good.

[fiendishlyclever]

I like the shared play lists on Spotify, for example I subscribe to the billboard charts and the BBC radio two play lists. Both update on a weekly basis so I get new music every week. I suppose it's a bit like a curated radio station but better. (I also have an nus card so Spotify is £5 a month )

[flyinghaggis]

I subscribed to Apple Music today but I can't seem to get it to work? Either I'm doing something really stupid and I'm not understanding how it works or there's some weird setting on my account that's preventing it working correctly.

 

I've signed up to it for the three month trial. If I try playing music using iTunes on my Windows computer it won't play anything other than local tracks I've copied off CD's or music videos? If I try to play any streaming music it just keeps flicking through tracks and nothing plays. It I try and add anything to my library then select to 'make available offline' the downloads fail with 'unknown error 400'?

 

On my iPhone I can stream music OK but if I try downloading any using the 'make available offline' option once again the downloads fail and it doesn't allow me to save any music? It keeps retrying the downloads but can't connect?

 

Anyone any ideas where I'm going wrong. Am I missing something totally obvious

 

Edit: There seems to be quite a few posts on the Apple support forums with people complaining about similar issues. Most say they haven't changed/updated anything and the issue suddenly started happening so it's probably something wrong at Apple's end. Think I'll leave it for now and give it a try again next week. Most posts related to it seem to be from that last 48 hours so I possibly just picked a bad time to try installing it !

 

I didn't realise when Apple offered a 3 month free trial what they meant was a 90-day beta test

Edited July 18, 2015 by flyinghaggis

[flyinghaggis]

Right, found out how to fix it but I'm still not exactly sure what's causing the problem. Another user on the Apple support forums said they were using Google for their DNS and it worked after they switched to Norton's DNS (199.85.127.10,199.85.126.10). I'd left mine set to my Sky Broadband router address so I'm presumably getting whatever Sky's offering it's customers as default. Changing it to Norton's DNS servers fixed the problem though and it's now working as expected.

 

Very odd? Still, hopefully this will help out anyone else with similar issues.

Edited July 18, 2015 by flyinghaggis

[ZeroHour]

I have large problems with Apple Music on Windows (using Google DNS right now) and it will play for a bit but if I switch tracks/playlists it starts failing to play and continuing to the next track. Rebooting usually fixes it until next time and others have mentioned audio drivers being a problem.

I am starting to suspect it may be DRM failing to lock down the audio hardware but its still early days.

The interface is a bit of a mess as well right now on Windows but it works well on iPhone so far.

[DalekSec]

I will always use Spotify, main reason (and only reason I need) I don't have to give any money to apple!

[flyinghaggis]

Yeah, right now there isn't really a compelling reason to move away from Spotify if you're happy with it. Apple Music pretty much just offers exactly the same thing and with Spotify you avoid the hassle of having to deal with the monstrosity that is iTunes!

 

However, the stereo in my car connects to my iPhone and, because Apple Music is basically an extension of the built in music app, I can control Apple music from my stereo so it displays track information/song selection/etc on screen whereas Spotify doesn't. For this reason I'd personally go with Apple Music but other than that I couldn't really pick one over the other.

Edited July 20, 2015 by flyinghaggis

[ZeroHour]

There are quite a lot of discrepancies with music availability, I have seen quite a few albums on Spotify not on Music but it will improve and I am not sure if its the playback bug.

I just hope they clean up the windows app as its a bit of a mess, shared playlists would be good too.

[flyinghaggis]

There are quite a lot of discrepancies with music availability, I have seen quite a few albums on Spotify not on Music but it will improve and I am not sure if its the playback bug.

I just hope they clean up the windows app as its a bit of a mess, shared playlists would be good too.

 

I suspect you've probably added more music that I have I went through my entire artist library in Spotify to check it on Apple Music and, as far as I could see, they have the exact same selection. I guess it'll depend on which artists you pick though. I tend to listen to albums (or artists top songs) rather than creating custom playlists which is maybe why it hasn't impacted me. Other than the infuriating DNS bug I haven't noticed any other issues so far.

 

Yeah, shared playlists would be handy. I saw the share artist/album option and assumed it would also work with playlists. Seems like a pretty annoying omission if it doesn't but I'm sure it's something they'll add though.

Edited July 20, 2015 by flyinghaggis

[psydii]

I can't compare to Spotify, but EE used to give me a pretty decent Deezer subscription.

 

I'm not that impressed with Apple Music's decisions regarding what I might be interested in. My tastes have moved on since 1998, and Deezer seemed to have got that.

 

A couple of the curated playlists have been pretty clever and I've enjoyed them, but in general that which it chooses to show me is pretty disappointing.

 

If anyone can give me a clue to how to get it to skew towards new music that isn't also skewed towards the U.S. Mainstream I'd like to know.

 

But at this point I'm likely to go back to Deezer who also had a really great UI for getting from what ever was playing to the artist page to adding the album to your music library.

[comrade]

Apple music and many other Apple services are down.

 

The world is going to end.

[ZeroHour]

Sigh... now itunes wont even play mp3 files for me....

[Arthur]

Apple Music is a nightmare and I’m done with it

 

As if all of that wasn’t enough, Apple Music gave me one more kick in the head. Over the weekend, I turned off Apple Music and it took large chunks of my purchased music with it. Sadly, many of the songs were added from CDs years ago that I no longer have access to. Looking at my old iTunes Match library, before Apple Music, I’m missing about 4,700 songs. At this point, I just don’t care anymore, I just want Apple Music off my devices.

 

PSA: Don’t cancel your iTunes Match subscription if you deleted your matched music

 

Since Apple appeared to have rolled the functionality of iTunes Match into Apple Music, it was looking like there wouldn't be any point in retaining an iTunes Match subscription if you were planning to continue your streaming music subscription after the free trial. But MacWorld senior contributor Kirk McElhearn found that there is one small but crucial difference between the two: DRM …

 

With iTunes Match, if your own music doesn’t have Digital Rights Management restrictions, uploading it to iTunes Match doesn't change that. If you delete your local copy of an album and re-download it, you get back a non-DRM version. But that isn't the case with Apple Music. Download one of your own tracks from Apple Music, and it arrives as a DRM-locked version.

 

It’s been suggested that this may have been a condition imposed by music labels for allowing Apple to wrap the match functionality into Apple Music. If so, it wouldn't be the first time this has happened. Either way, if you've used iTunes Match as a convenient way to free up space on your Mac by deleting your own copy of any of your music, don’t cancel your subscription in favor of Apple Music if you want to keep that music DRM free.

 

If you haven’t deleted your own copies of your music, then there’s nothing to worry about. If you download onto other devices from Apple Music, those devices will get the DRM versions, but you’ll still have your DRM-free originals.

[jmak]

Tidal is what you (well I) really want: http://tidal.com/gb

 

More gaps than Spotify (which I subscribe to) and Apple Music (which I won't after the mess I got into with iTunes).

 

Tidal is streamed at a respectable quality - the others are OK for your phone or a car, but Tidal is good enough to listen to at home on half decent kit. Twice the price of Spotify though...

[newpersn]

Anyone giving this a try again.... Im trying to get my head around it now but its not as simple as spotify.

[KoolTech]

This is the same question I found myself asking as my free trial with Apple Music comes to an end. I have decided to stick with Spotify - for now.

 

I like Apple Music, it looks good and works well I found BUT I missed Spotifys playlists too much. I also found on compilation albums that Apple Music had so many more songs grayed out than Spotify, even though the songs are on the service. I also had issues syncing offline music with Apple when I never have with Spotify. I think Apple Music will only get better though and they will get a lot more exclusives as they have the money/power to out pay other services so I will look at it again in a few months time.

[newpersn]

This is the same question I found myself asking as my free trial with Apple Music comes to an end. I have decided to stick with Spotify - for now.

 

I like Apple Music, it looks good and works well I found BUT I missed Spotifys playlists too much. I also found on compilation albums that Apple Music had so many more songs grayed out than Spotify, even though the songs are on the service. I also had issues syncing offline music with Apple when I never have with Spotify. I think Apple Music will only get better though and they will get a lot more exclusives as they have the money/power to out pay other services so I will look at it again in a few months time.

 

Thats the same problem i got now. Looking in itunes and half the tracks are greyed out... I thought it was a fault of my computer/laptop but there both signed in...

[flyinghaggis]

Likewise, I'm gonna stick with Spotify for now. I think Apple music only really makes sense if you're so committed to the Apple ecosystem that the convenience of it outweighs the negatives. Spotify is just straight up better at this point in time IMO plus it means not having to faff about with iTunes.

 

Apple music might become more compelling in future if they expand the service to include subscriptions for video and gaming content though.

Edited September 28, 2015 by flyinghaggis