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Apple Music Reportedly Surpasses Spotify Subscriber Count in the U.S.

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I have been an Apple user for many years. But when it comes to music, I’ve always been frustrated with Apple. I think Apple’s typical customer only has a small collection of music and most of it was purchased from iTunes. I have a very large music collection and I almost never purchase music from Apple. I still buy CDs since I prefer creating my own lossless-quality, digital copies. Back when there was just the iPod, the hard drive space never grew to be large enough for me to carry around all of my music. It was a large amount, but it wasn’t everything – I have always had to create a playlist of everything I wanted on my device since it was a subset of everything I owned. When the iPhone came out, Apple held off making the hard drive large enough to hold everything – all my apps, all my media. After all these years, we’re finally up to 256 GB on the iPhone and ideally, I would prefer more space. But the average user doesn’t need a lot of storage space. Along comes Apple Music. Being able to listen to their catalog of music was very enticing. But in order to take full advantage of the service, you have to be willing to use the cloud library. At this time, Apple is not offering lossless quality, so if I were to do so, the music files it matches would be of lesser quality than the ones I currently listen to. I tried Apple Music anyway, without using the cloud library. And it really came down to playlists for me. I simply wanted to create a playlist of the tracks I discovered on Apple Music so that I could remember them and hear them again. But without the cloud library, I could not do so. Then I thought about Spotify. I was curious to see if I could create a simple playlist and add a track to it. Turns out I could do so easily, even with a free account. Just that won me over. I now subscribe to Spotify and I cancelled my Apple Music.

I also found the interface of Apple Music to be disappointing. I had trouble finding new music I was interested in. If I wanted to just randomly play new tracks, I kept having to choose all genres mixed together in one big mess. I would hunt for playlists that looked interesting, but I just found the interface to be lacking. With Spotify, I have a number of options for finding new music. There’s the general New Music Friday playlist which has the latest hits, the Release Radar for new tracks, Discover Weekly, and my favorite are the smart playlists that play new music that it thinks I would like based on my listening habits and it works well. A bit like Pandora but a playlist instead of a radio station. I felt with Apple Music, I had to think of the artist or album on my own and I could search for it and probably find it since their catalog is great, but I wanted Apple to suggest songs/albums better than it did.
 
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1050792 said:
I did read and answered your question "If you *don't* enable iCloud Music Library, you can't download anything for offline listening, which I'm sure makes sense to someone at Apple, but... huh?". You seem to be the one with lack of reading or comprehension skills.
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I'm sure there's some reason you think that downloading a random file to my local device should be related to my having to upload my content to a cloud service, but I can't imagine what that would be.
 
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I wish Apple music would return to having the Ad-supported ("free") option. I don't mind a few ads to pay for listening, but I hate paying subscriptions, so we use Google play music, Spotify, Pandora, etc. I'd love to use Apple music and I am happy to pay for it by listening to some ads, but that's not an option anymore so we went to other services.

It used to be that we did everything we could to stay fully committed in the Apple eco system (Airports, online services, mac seervers, mac desktops, mac laptops, Apple TV, iphones, ipads, etc...) but in the last few years it has felt like the value of being fully integrated into the Apple eco system has slowly been eroding (at least for our uses) we are slowly having more and more Apple competing products in our home and rotating out some of the Apple products when their usefulness ends with non Apple products. Don't get me wrong I still love Apple, but if you had asked me 10 or even 7 years ago if we would be headed this direction I would have been adamant that we would stay with all Apple products in our home.
 
TimmeyCook said:
Spotify comes ore-installed on most Android phones, at least with Samsung’s and Android is bigger than Apple.
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No it doesn't. I'm looking at five devices (Samsung, 2x Moto, Huawei, Amazon) and none have Spotify installed by default.
 
I read somewhere in this thread that you can ignore particular genres in AM. Can anyone tell me how to do it? Can't seem to find it.

Thanks
 
Lesser Evets said:
I would perhaps sign up and get on that subscription if iTunes wasn't so annoying.

It is impossible to search through iTunes music without a gigantic hassle. If you aren't buying into the modern dreck they are pushing, they stifle your ability to find anything unless you have a precise-laser-focus-trigger-phrase search. They won't even RECOMMEND within a genre unless it is new and dumpy. Hidden gems of the past are paved over by popularity and corporate junk.

How many times can I listen to Pink or U2 or (hip, modern, boring, suburban-bland band) before I barf? About once. Maybe less.

Apple has a massive problem in archiving and displaying and presenting of music. Your money masters might lead around the noobs by a nose ring, but I want something fresh from the days of great music and hifi production. Apple Music doesn't help me.

And gramps, here, hates the loudness war, too. Someone, please, stop with compression and let me turn up the volume to hear nuance.
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I am subscribed to Apple Music, but amen to your critique. I use Spotify too, and prefer it for discovering music - especially genre-specific.
 
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TimmeyCook said:
Spotify comes ore-installed on most Android phones, at least with Samsung’s and Android is bigger than Apple.
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Which is it, MOST Android phones (most brands) or just Samsung and you're guessing about the other brands? Do you have any facts to back this statement up?

I don't think you do. None of my Android phones / tablets have ever had Spotify preloaded.
 
I probably sound old, but Apple Music and ITunes interfaces are not intuitive overall to me.
And I’m also worried about my future with the Mac if hardware does not get better (to me - not trying to start that war on this thread). Don’t know if I want to be wedded to Apple ecosystem completely at this point, even if I expect to continue to stay with iPhone.

Still using/ paying for both but trying to choose one.
 
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chilly willy said:
I probably sound old, but Apple Music and ITunes interfaces are not intuitive overall to me.
And I’m also worried about my future with the Mac if hardware does not get better (to me - not trying to start that war on this thread). Don’t know if I want to be wedded to Apple ecosystem completely at this point, even if I expect to continue to stay with iPhone.

Still using/ paying for both but trying to choose one.
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My sentiments exactly. Why bother making Macs when you can sell people subscriptions to content?
 
My iTunes library represents years and years of careful collection and curation. But when iTunes Match came out, I figured "why not" and gave it a shot. It rampaged through my iTunes library. Mismatched songs I had as belonging to crappy "best of" compilations instead of the real albums I had them tagged with, ruined tons of cover art I'd added to stuff. Trashed lyrics I'd added. I had to nuke everything and revert to Time Machine backups of my whole library, it was so bad. So then Apple Music came out and I was very very mistrustful of it. I went to Spotify and never looked back.

So I ask this of anybody here who had a good pre-existing iTunes library and then turned on Apple Music: did it F with your existing music or did it leave your stuff intact? (If you had random MP3s and then turned on AM, I'm not talking to you, I'm talking to people who had their library tagged and carefully organized, thanks.)
 
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TimmeyCook said:
That was always BS, it was a paid hit by the crap competitor.

Guess what? People are more interested in real people impressions than on crappy bloggers.
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I'm not interested in anyone's impressions other than my own! I don't care what works for you. I care what works for me.
 
TimmeyCook said:
Oh sir, please enlighten us which ways Spotify is better?

Besides “because I said so”.

Spotify is crap until it:

1. Allows me to upload my own music and stream my own files
2. Lyrics
3. Vídeos
4. Human made concise playlists, not 500-plus playlists that are basically a google search
5. Decent navigation, without tiny buttons
6. iPad interface
7. Apple Watch interface
8. A tried and true desktop interface
9. Voice controls, not asking Siri because it’s impossible for them, but any speech recognition, e.g. YouTube has speech recognition, why a paid service can’t pay any cloud service for speech recognition
10. Most of all, Apple Music has more music in it.
Click to expand...

Until you pointed these out I honestly didn't realize how far Apple Music had come. Good job!
 
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At this point, I'm subscribed to both, and I hate it.

Apple Music's personal library management is worth every penny, letting you mix uploaded, purchased, and streamed tracks and having all the granular control of the (bad interface, but very powerful) iTunes, and a very well laid out iOS app. Also the deep-OS integration with spotlight and Siri is awesome. Also I feel the audio quality is better (I know its 256 vs Spotify's 320, but it just sounds so much better, especially in songs with complex treble and tons of hi hats and scares and stuff. My theory is AAC is better than OGG for electronic music, both are set to only feed me the highest quality file).

But while Spotify falls short on library management, it shines in discovery. Spotify has infinitely better playlists (for EDM at least, the "supplied" playlists on both suck but Spotify has extensive user created content thats gold). Also Spotify connect is incredible, I can hand off my queue and play session from any device (a feature I'm flabbergasted apple music doesn't have with apples handoff), and I love that I can sign into my account on any computer and control it from my phone (especially with apple musics very odd 90 day limitation), great for playing music at work and parties.

If Spotify ever lets me upload my own tracks, and edit my tracks tags ill probably ditch apple music. If apple music lets me sign into my account on any machine as often as I want, and improves browsing user-generated content without having them in my contact book, ill probably ditch Spotify.

Also I would love for either of them to offer a hi-fi tier but I can only dream.

edit: also I HATE that Spotify's list view doesn't have album art. It's a small issue, that is pretty much a deal breaker for someone who is visual.
 
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