While the entertainment industry has spawned a number of streaming platforms further reinforcing choice paralysis across the masses, the music world has landed on two major competing platforms: Spotify and Apple Music. But, which streaming service is better?
First created in 2006 in Stockholm, Spotify is one of the largest music providers in the world with over 600 million monthly users. As music artists faced a major piracy world, Spotify emerged as a middle-man catalogue offering millions of songs to stream instead of purchase. The platform’s rise in popularity in the 2010s revolutionized the music sphere as a whole.
Conversely, it comes as no surprise that Apple Music entered many markets to compete against existing giants to replicate or reinvent features of their competitors for their own platforms. In a world where users were no longer buying individual digital singles or albums when they could pay less for more in streaming, Apple had to adapt to the current landscape, along with a few other platforms spawning like Amazon Music and Tidal. Apple Music rose in 2015, now catering to 93 million subscribers and is compatible with a number of different devices.
Despite their many similarities, users of the two giants have created extensive debate on which platform is ultimately better.
Catalogue
Both Spotify and Apple Music offer over 100 million songs to choose from and thousands of expert-created playlists. One feature Apple Music offers that their competitors do not is the option to watch music videos and a plethora of music-related documentaries or concert movies from artists anywhere between Billie Eilish to The Velvet Underground. Apple Music also offers the opportunity to listen to live radio from a variety of in-house stations.
Despite this, Spotify still seems to win in terms of range. Spotify acts as a one-stop shop not just offering music and endless playlists, but also podcasts and now audiobooks for purchase, which Apple Music does not. Instead, Apple has separate apps for either (Apple Podcasts and Books).
Pricing
Right off the bat, Spotify offers a free version allowing users to get a taste at listening to music even without paying, something Apple Music does not offer. Although the free option, pales in comparison to any paid option, still consists of unskippable ads between every few songs, can seem unbearable in its user experience. It is also known to offer a much lower resolution in audio quality than the premium version.
An individual Spotify Premium account offers ad-free listening starting at $11.99/month, offers downloadable music to listen offline, higher audio quality, the ability to listen with friends in real time, and 15 hours a month of listening time from their audiobooks subscriber catalogue. This option, as well as that of the Student plan (at $5.99/month with an added Hulu subscription account) are both offered with a free 3-month trial run.
The 3-month trial run is also offered to Apple Music users and is followed by a $10.99/month charge or an equivalent $5.99 for a Student plan including access to Apple TV+.
Spotify also offers a “Duo” bundle for couples living together offering two premium plans for $16.99/month and a Family plan for up to six premium or kids accounts (the ability to control explicit content) for $19.99/month.
Apple Music’s Family plan allowing for the same amount of accounts is instead offered at $16.99, but does not seem to offer an equivalent to parental monitoring.
Although there is a significant price difference in family plans, the individualized or student plans are priced virtually the same, but offer much different user experiences.
User-driven strategy
As average music fans represent the primary demographic for either platform, it is important to note why either platform can satiate fans’ needs.
According to Sound Buttons Lab, a soundboard creating website, Spotify is known for its customer-driven strategies to create personalized experiences for listeners. One of Spotify’s favored features is their algorithmic pursuit to personalize users’ experiences, from recommending similar songs and artists to those they are familiar with, to a myriad of customized playlists formed from previous listening habits.
When December rolls around, many point to Spotify for their yearly “Spotify Wrapped,” a personalized collection of statistics of users’ listening habits, communicated through colorful videos and snappy categorization. Much like astrology or the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, telling users what “aura” their listening habits exude or what college town they likely represent simply for their personal choices is compelling and reinforcing.
In 2019, three years after Spotify’s continued tradition, Apple Music began rolling out their “Apple Music Replay,” presenting their version of their users’ statistics in a similar yet cleaner manner. Over the years, the two companies have tried to one-up each other and improve the execution of these recounts, Apple going as far as offering statistical breakdowns far more frequently than yearly.
But, do monthly breakdowns hit as hard as waiting the entire year?
Moral desire to shift
Many have also made shifts from one platform to another for financial, political or moral reasons.
Many users have made the shift from Spotify to Apple Music in protest against Spotify’s endorsement and funding of Joe Rogan’s “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast. In 2022 amidst the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Rogan was under fire for fear-mongering and promoting false information and conspiracy theories related to the virus and vaccine.
Along with over 200 medical professionals signing a petition to de-platform the podcaster, musician Neil Young gave the platform a him-or-me ultimatum ending in Young removing his music from the platform. Soon after, sensation Joni Mitchell followed suit in solidarity with Young to urge the de-platforming Rogan. Whether that be in protest against Rogan or for merely wishing to listen to their favourite musicians, many left Spotify for their competitor.
Despite this motion, earlier this year, Rogan signed a $250 million deal allowing for his podcast to be available on a number of different platforms, no longer being exclusive to Spotify, and coincidentally, both Young and Mitchell’s music was quietly reuploaded to Spotify given the podcast’s multi-platform accessibility.
So, is the change still worth it?
Audio quality
One of the major critiques Spotify faces in comparison to the user experience of Apple Music is in relation to sound quality. Many users have expressed a noticeable shift in sound quality when switching from the former to the latter, going as far as to say the sound quality on Apple Music is inexplicably far superior.
Coincidentally, Neil Young has also shared his dismay for Spotify’s compressed audio quality when exiting the platform, calling it a “degraded and neutered sound… If you support Spotify, you are destroying an art form.” Amidst his return to the service, Young reiterated his concerns: “[I have] sincere hopes that Spotify sound quality will improve and people will be able to hear and feel all the music as we made it…Hopefully Spotify will turn to Hi Res{olution] as the answer and serve all the music to everyone.”
But, what is the real audio difference?
Well, Apple Music has now updated their entire catalogue to 16-bit/44.1 kHz (CD quality) to 24-bit/192 kHz. Spotify’s “lite” tier has been known to have significantly lower resolution compared to the service’s “premium” tier, where the free version’s Ogg Vorbis codec quality is between 24 kbit/s to 160 kbit/s while the paid version offers a “very high” resolution option offering up to 320 kbit/s.
For clarification, Apple Music’s audio quality is dependent on bit depth/kilohertz or sample rate whereby describing the accuracy and fidelity of the original audio signal in recording or playback, while Spotify concerns bitrate, or the amount of data used to encode audio, compressing the original audio quality.
Therefore, Apple Music’s preservation of original audio quality accurately reflects artists’ vision and caters to the needs of audiophiles. Ultimately, though, many have argued that the audio difference was not a major dealbreaker.
Artist pay
While Rogan or audio quality are valid reasons to make a switch from Spotify to Apple Music, many artists have advocated against the former for the sheer difference in royalty earnings. For example, Apple Music follows Tidal as the second highest earning per stream on a platform, making $0.008 per stream, while Spotify offers less than half at $0.00318 per stream. For reference, Spotify pays artists in royalties based on the proportion between the number of artist streams and total songs streamed, where 70% of earnings are paid to rights holders or record labels.
Artists have tried to fight against the fractions of pennies they make on streams, but like with Taylor Swift pulling her catalogue from Spotify in 2014–which seems laughable now considering she remains in the top ten artists on the platform to date with over 100 million monthly listeners–or with Young who stated not being able to afford retiring his music from all major platforms, the streaming age is unavoidable.
This debate on payout differences may seem juvenile when thinking about artists who earn hundreds of millions of streams on songs weekly, but this pay difference becomes a greater issue for smaller artists who are not afforded the same amount of attention.
Fundamentally, when it comes to consumers, many are after if they can get more bang for their buck, and this all depends on whether they believe the benefits outweigh the costs. Whether that be feeling like your streaming service catered to you and gives you a decent amount of selection, or because audio quality, paying artists more fairly, and your purchased singles from middle school are hoarded from your Apple Music library, either app can cater to different needs.
