This was the reason I chose Spotify over Apple music all those years ago.
Any reason to prefer Apple Music over Spotify? Spotify's recommendations have been absolutely stellar for me over the years and I have a lot of playlists and stuff "locking" me in.
Apple has long had a much better experience when it comes to offline use and private media.
With iCloud, tracks you add to your library are automatically uploaded to Apple's cloud and become available on all devices. That helps a lot because you don't have to resort to using some other player for that those obscure albums that aren't streaming anywhere. After all, while Apple and Spotify have a lot of music, there are still many holes in their inventories.
Apple has always been much nicer about offline track availability. Just click the download icon and the tracks will stay on your device. Spotify has had this feature, but it's been flaky. After Apple Music launched, they eventually added a "Download" toggle to albums, but only in the mobile app (it's there for playlists in the desktop app, for some reason).
Spotify has a 10,000 song limit that applies to adding (or "liking" as it's now called) to your library. You can keep more in playlists, but you can't "like" more than 10,000 songs, which is crazy. It's not a lot of songs. My jazz collection alone is more than that. Apple's limit is 100,000, as far as I can tell.
Without even going into the merits of Spotify's playlists as you mentioned, one reason I would personally prefer Spotify over Apple Music even if we assume rest of the things equal would be to support a small player(compared to Apple). Apple, a company already well entrenched in so many fields controlling one more is something I would not prefer to see. They already are at a huge advantage in even controlling this market as owning iOS and iTunes makes it very easy for them to push their service.
Tell Apple, not me. I’d have written it myself already if such a thing were possible. Special VPNs can do this, or you can just carry a travel router, 4g modem, and usb battery pack velcroed to your ankle, and connect to it via WiFi, so that you can blackhole things via DNS or iptables.
I almost never use Spotify on my phone. The one exception is when I needed to handle the music for my wedding (piped it through some massive bluetooth speakers).
If you have a big collection of obscure/foreign music (video game music is a great example), then nothing beats Apple Music + iCloud Music Library and iTunes match.
You can use iTunes match to provide cloud-based high quality versions for music ripped from your CDs (or collected during your teenage Napster years).
Even better, being able to mix content from your iCloud Music Library and streamable content from Apple Music is a huge plus.
Does it touch my original files in any way? I have a huge selection of rare and obscure music not available via iTunes or any streaming service. Obviously I don't want any service to touch, modify or replace these or any of my more popular release. I'm wary about auto matching. Should I be?
Lossless files are stored as 256kbps AAC in their cloud. I believe lossy MP3s and AACs are uploaded as-is. (I'm glad that Apple is aware that transcoding is generally a bad thing.)
iTunes also doesn't upload files that don't have a minimum bitrate of 96kbps [1].
For my use, all the major streaming platforms are broadly equivalent in functionality, so I go with the cheapest one. That was Amazon Music when I had Prime, which I haven't renewed. Spotify is about 50% more expensive than Apple Music in my location, so I'll likely be going with Apple Music when my Amazon subscription expires.
Apple Music's offline playback has bugs but it is less broken than Spotify's (although unlike Spotify you can't automatically download all your songs, you have to do some hacky workaround where you create a smart playlist of all of your songs and then download that playlist every time you get a new song)
I imagine this is more Apple’s doing than Spotify’s, but last I tried I couldn’t put Spotify music on my Apple Watch to use untethered. I run with my Apple Watch, Bluetooth headphones and no phone, and being able to do that is worth choosing Apple Music for me.
Also no Facebook SDK if you care about that, there was the recent article here about how that pings Facebook with identifiers on app launch even if you’re not using any of its functionality yourself.
In offline mode, the app is basically useless.
No way to browse through the artist's whose songs I've saved up. Gets worse -
Say I want to listen to a particular album. I type the name of the album. I do not get a result of the album which I can go to, and play start to end. I do get, however, random songs from the album which if I'm lucky, and remember the sequence in which they appear on the album, I can manually add to the queue and listen to.
The artist tab doesn't work. The album tab doesn't work. These are online only tabs which include things like "New releases", "Fans also like", "Performing Livr" etc.
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Even when I'm connected to the net ( at home), there is no way to see all the artists whose songs I've added to my library.
There is no library.
Songs you can "like", artists you can "follow". When i follow an artist, and click on him, I don't see the albums I've added to my library/liked.
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tl,dr: It's a UX clusterfuck. They took something which works and fucked it up ad infinitum. I've switched to Apple music, which is undoubtedly bad in terms of recommendations, but at least it lets me listen to the stuff I know I like.
Spotify recently changed their Family plan to allow the main user to control the explicit lyrics filter. However, I'm not sure if that filter is on a per-person basis or across the whole family.
Any reason to prefer Apple Music over Spotify? Spotify's recommendations have been absolutely stellar for me over the years and I have a lot of playlists and stuff "locking" me in.