Apple Music vs. Spotify: A Detailed Comparison and Review

By Kamal Nayan - 24 Jun '15 03:26AM
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Apple Music has been one of the most talked about announcements at the WWDC this year. However, Apple is not the first company to take on streaming music. Players like Spotify and Rdio have already made their presence felt, but undoubtedly, there's still a chance for a new player in the market.

Here we compare Apple Music with Spotify, currently the most popular music streaming platform.

Price

Every major streaming service, including Apple Music and Spotify Premium, costs $9.99 per month. However, unlike Spotify, Apple Music won't include free-tier which is going to be an advantage for Spotify.

Music Selection

Both Spotify and Apple Music claim to have 30+ million tracks in their libraries. However, Apple Music wont include all the songs from the iTunes library because separate deals must be made with each label for their music to be streamable. So this is a tie for both the services.

Music Discovery

From what Apple claims, Apple Music is better than any other music streaming services as it has features like "Genius" playlists that finds music based on what you like and human-curated playlists that focus on particular genre or mood. In addition Beats 1 will be a radio station broadcasting 24.7 with superstar DJs and exclusive performances.

Community & Social Integration

Apple Music has a unique feature, Connect, which is a social platform for artists to share exclusive or behind-the-scene content that fans can watch and share. In comparison, Spotify has a very minimal social integration.

User Interface

Apple has been known to simplify user interfaces and we're expecting Apple Music will also be very intuitive and user-friendly. On the other hand, Spotify has also done a fantastic job of making its service as easy to use as possible. So in this case, it will really depend on users' personal preferences.

In conclusion, both the services are quite similar but as Spotify has been around this block a few times and already has 75 million users, 20 million of whom pay monthly for the service, we would like to award this preliminary battle to Spotify.

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