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Pandora and Spotify Lead App Store Music Rankings as Beats Continues to Lag
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I left Spotify for Beats. I'm betting on Siri integration. But Beats is really pretty awful. The App quits playing music pretty often. It skips to the next song once in a while for no reason. It hates it when I drive away from my house and it has to switch from WIFI to LTE. Spotify did all these things perfectly.
The worst thing about Beats - no desktop App! I rejoiced at the Apple TV App because I thought it would come to the desktop next. Nope. Really pathetic.
Here's what you need to know about the curated playlists. 99% are never updated. There are some specific playlists that are supposed to keep up with the latest... like my top 25 indie. The Beats curators hardly update those playlists.
Spotify by contrast, has a lot of playlists made by passionate bloggers who update their playlists constantly. So it actually has better curation and keeps you up to date with latest music much more thoroughly, as long as you know who to follow.
Also, getting followers on Spotify is a lot easier. I promoted my own indie playlists on Twitter, directly to Beats, nothing. With Spotify I got a few new followers each month.
Truthfully, no one who cares about music cares about Beats.
Lastly, Beats primarily promotes rap and hip hop on Twitter. Yay
I had left Spotify for MOG and MOG was awesome. It had a better library, not as many lame covers and overall better digitized quality than Spotify.
Then Beats acquired MOG, for $15 million. Then Apple acquired Beats for 3 billion.
MOG had a great feature, named Artist Radio, which allowed you to create a radio station based on an artist, like Pandora. Both Spotify and Rhapsody have something similar, although neither has an algorithm as good as Pandora does. iTunes Radio's algorithm is not great, either.
So, Beats removed the Artist Radio feature from MOG, got rid of the desktop app and generally degraded the UI.
I hate Beats and rarely listen to it anymore, even though I have prepaid for a year.
Thinking of going either with Rhapsody or Spotify now.
I have also long abandoned my 200gb of lossless rips I still keep on an NAS. Streaming is so much easier and streaming Artist Radio, like Pandora, allows me to discover new music I might like. The sound quality with higher bitrate streams is close enough to lossless that I can't tell the difference on the same material. Yes, I do have an "audiophile" system with great speakers
P.S. I have been searching for a random sample of obscure artists in Beats, Spotify and Rhapsody and I have to admit that Beats still has the best library and the least amount of covers (some of which can be almost as bad as karaoke
. This is not credit to Beats, however, but to MOG. Beats acquired the MOG library when they bought it.
By my totally unscientific and limited survey, Beats has the most complete, high quality library, Spotify is next and finally, Rhapsody. Rhapsody is closer to Spotify than Spotify is to Beats.
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I have to say, there are a couple things that might seem little to Apple, but, they are the main reason I still predominantly use Pandora.
• Pandora has the ability to not only shuffle my stations, but, I can choose which ones I want included in the shuffle or shuffle all. Apple could do this and take it one step further and let me create more than one "shuffle" of my stations. Also, the UI is pretty easy to manage this, or even stations in general.
• iTunes radio uses quite a bit of data, and has no settings to lower that. 1) Pandora has, in "advanced" settings, the ability to turn on high quality audio. With this turned off, not only do I use less cell data, but, I can stream audio on 2G/EDGE (just a short wait for it to buffer, then it keeps going). I can turn high quality on when I don't need to watch my cell data, or on wifi. (I think the default is off, not sure). 2) Also, Spotify has data rate settings, though, I still have trouble using it on 2G/EDGE.
***Apple needs to realize that it can't only offer the highest quality at the expense of huge amounts of cell data. 5 years from now, that might be ok, but, right now, many people are either on limited data plans, or, if unlimited, get throttled over 5GB (or some other amount). iTunes radio (and, SoundCloud) use huge amounts of data. Yeah, they sound great, but, we need a bit more flexibility, give us some settings so we can better control our cell data usage.
Unfortunately, Apple has grown so much with the success of the iPhone, they seem to be veering a bit into "corporate", and "board decision" mentality. Yeah, minimalism is really great, but, we do sometimes need a bit more flexibility. (desktop iTunes is another mammoth that needs a total overhaul.)
• Pandora has the ability to not only shuffle my stations, but, I can choose which ones I want included in the shuffle or shuffle all. Apple could do this and take it one step further and let me create more than one "shuffle" of my stations. Also, the UI is pretty easy to manage this, or even stations in general.
• iTunes radio uses quite a bit of data, and has no settings to lower that. 1) Pandora has, in "advanced" settings, the ability to turn on high quality audio. With this turned off, not only do I use less cell data, but, I can stream audio on 2G/EDGE (just a short wait for it to buffer, then it keeps going). I can turn high quality on when I don't need to watch my cell data, or on wifi. (I think the default is off, not sure). 2) Also, Spotify has data rate settings, though, I still have trouble using it on 2G/EDGE.
***Apple needs to realize that it can't only offer the highest quality at the expense of huge amounts of cell data. 5 years from now, that might be ok, but, right now, many people are either on limited data plans, or, if unlimited, get throttled over 5GB (or some other amount). iTunes radio (and, SoundCloud) use huge amounts of data. Yeah, they sound great, but, we need a bit more flexibility, give us some settings so we can better control our cell data usage.
Unfortunately, Apple has grown so much with the success of the iPhone, they seem to be veering a bit into "corporate", and "board decision" mentality. Yeah, minimalism is really great, but, we do sometimes need a bit more flexibility. (desktop iTunes is another mammoth that needs a total overhaul.)
I honestly tried to like the Beats app but, for me, it just isn't intuitive. You always end up having to go back back back to get to where you were . I wrestle with it. It doesn't "serve" me. The design elements are ok but the UX is quite bad. Those bubble discoveries are getting so tired.
I LOVE iTunes radio. I'm getting awesome Electrolux, trip hop, PBR&B tracks. Just enter in any artist / song and you have a nice station. FREE. Why would you pay for Beats?
I LOVE iTunes radio. I'm getting awesome Electrolux, trip hop, PBR&B tracks. Just enter in any artist / song and you have a nice station. FREE. Why would you pay for Beats?
Also surprised that Rdio isn't higher. Great, dependable service. Is Spotify any better (to those who have used both)?
Spoitfy remains the best. Sorry Apple. Dont see beats getting the traffic Spotify or Pandora has anytime soon. Apple came on board the streaming train too late and a lot of people who do stream are already integrated.
I tried out the other but always came back to Spotify. Its just great. Google and Apple really need to be innovative with their streaming services if they want to remain competitive in the market. iTunes is already starting to fall and probably will continue to fall. I'd say the end of the era where Apple has so much power in the music industry is near us.
I tried out the other but always came back to Spotify. Its just great. Google and Apple really need to be innovative with their streaming services if they want to remain competitive in the market. iTunes is already starting to fall and probably will continue to fall. I'd say the end of the era where Apple has so much power in the music industry is near us.
I feel like if someone was on Spotify then they have no need for Beats. That goes for Pandora. To me, Pandora and Spotify function completely differently. Sure, they deliver streaming music, but I prefer Spotify when I am looking to listen to a specific artist. They do create playlists that are pretty good, which in turn means I use Pandora less and less. I am a paid subscriber of Spotify and never have paid for Pandora.
Not too crazy about the Beats Music UI. Plus, it seems that it is targeted at the hip-hop and rap genres which I don't listen to.
I'll stick with Spotify until Apple integrates Beats into iTunes.
I'll stick with Spotify until Apple integrates Beats into iTunes.
This is SO true. Instead of calling it Beats, they should call it Back. Because all you ever do is click back
Not true. Te Beats curation is geared to hip hop, but its library is not.
Beats inherited the MOG library, which is overall better than Spotify's, at least in my limited comparisons (MOG (now Beats) has more complete collections of original artists, while Spotify fakes it by including remixes and sometimes awful covers.
But the Beats UI is terrible, Beats doesn't have Artist Radio and it doesn't have a desktop app. So Spotify is overall better right now, particularly if you don't care about less popular artists.
Pandora has by far the best "Artist Radio" station algorithm, but the stream quality is mostly limited to 128kbps (only paid accounts and only on computers get the 192kbp), while most of the others are at 320kbps. The difference is definitely audible on decent equipment. Pandora obviously also doesn't let you chose an album or an artist and select individual songs.
Is the4e anything stopping Apple from taking the Beats music industry expertise and creating their own label for new, upcoming and unknown artists then using iTunes, itunes festivals etc to promote them like crazy?
Seems to be a bit of a missed opportunity..
Seems to be a bit of a missed opportunity..
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I've used both and Spotify was a design mess with really glitchy software. After 3-4 songs it would start looping back on itself playing the songs over but the songs would like melt into other songs and it was really weird and then the app would crash and then the app would continually crash several times and then you'd restart it a third or fourth time and it would play but it would pick up where the loop started and go through the same 3-4 songs and do it again and you couldn't skip past that error or the whole thing would crash again. It's probably fixed by now but I dealt with that bug for a while before I said screw it and went back to Rdio. I had originally started out on Rdio but they didn't have enough of a library. They were better when I went back. My biggest gripe with Rdio was no quality setting but they've since added a whole bunch of those controls so I'm good to go with high quality streaming!
If you are looking for high-quality streaming, you may want to check out qobuz.com and tidalhifi.com. Both services offer CD-quality streaming (lossless encoding at 44.1 kHz, 16 bits). I don't know where you live, but Qobuz is not yet available in the US.
Unrelated to any particular service, your new cans may be revealing not only inadequacies in the quality of the stream, but also the dynamic compression employed so rampantly in today's mastering. Regrettably, there is no workaround for this problem. Although, quartering offending mastering engineers might be a good place to start.
#justaudiophilethings
But seriously, in Pandora's case I wouldn't be surprised if the low quality hid the dynamic compression anyways. :
: Thanks for the tip, though. I'll check it out.
I too realized this immediately and lost all desire to listen to Pandora, now I've branched out other places like Mixcloud and Soundcloud.