Apple Music isn’t the best streaming music service — it’s just the least annoying::Competitors like Spotify and YouTube Music may be your first choice for music on Android, but you might want to reconsider
Yah no. Apple’s insistence on making everything a pain in the ass if you don’t own an Apple device makes it a nonstarter, and YouTube Music just works.
My kids have iPads because they’re both artists, but I’ll be damned if they’re getting any money from me for their craptacular - and yes, deeply annoying - music service. Hell, even setting up the iPads was annoying, because I don’t have any Apple devices of my own, and family controls require them, even though there’s no reason it couldn’t be done on a website.
Fuck Apple.
Hade you tried setting up an Xbox without being a Microsoft user?
Fuck Microsoft.
Apples and oranges. For all its faults (and there are lots), Microsoft doesn’t require you to own a Microsoft phone or tablet in order to set up an XBox’s parental controls. You can do it from a website with any device you want - including the Linux machines I use almost exclusively for computing.
My experience with Apple Music has been overwhelmingly positive. Student plan is dirt cheap, barely any more expensive than Spotify and has Hi-Fi included. And the app doesn’t connect to a disgusting amount of trackers like Spotify does. I’ll stay on AM for the foreseeable future
Same. It’s an impossible fight, with all this magical thinking about Apple biasing any discussion. So much blind hate and no way to debate it.
Apple pays much more to artists - period. That’s why I use it.
Tidal pays artists even more, and has some features Apple Music doesn’t have for the same price (or cheaper if you’re Military/First Responder)
But of course Apple Music is better for some people for certain features it has. And Tidal’s hi-fi plan is more expensive. I get the knee jerk dislike of Apple, but nuance almost always gets lost online.
That being said, Spotify sucks lol
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My experience with apple music has mostly been around being incredibly annoyed at the account management and signin process for people who don’t have any apple hardware. So I would probably disagree there.
Not to be pedantic but why on earth would you use Apple music if you aren’t in their ecosystem instead of one of the many other options for music?
I try out different things, they have apps on other platforms so the expectation is for those apps to not be a hateful cluster fuck on those platforms
If Microsoft made a thing for Mac I wouldn’t want or expect it to suck either.
Does it have a Linux app? no
Does it have a duo plan? no
Does it have a good rating on Google Play? no
Does it have a decent Windows app? last time i checked, itunes looked like an app from 2005
Spotify isn’t the least bit annoying for me though? It works brilliantly and does everything I need it to do and more.
It’ll be a cold day in hell before I use an Apple product though.
- Can’t turn off album art or colorized elements changing bright colors while driving. (I just want simple buttons to press to change tracks or pause music without distracting album art). This one is legitimately dangerous
1a. The last straw for me was when they deprecated car mode entirely and insisted on even more flashy moving elements in the standard player. It became a safety hazard to use.
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Can’t combine your own music with cloud music anymore (when Spotify started, you could combine their libraries with your own music if you had something that they didn’t)
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No normalization adjustments for songs that are too loud or too quiet
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No per-device (or at all iirc?) Equalization
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Periodic check-in required every (30d last time I used the service) for offline content, meaning if you download stuff to your laptop, don’t touch it for a month, and then go on a plane you don’t have access to your music.
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Constant background app openings. App opens itself constantly to track your location, and broadcast to other devices whether or not you’re playing music. Integrated with lots of ad/tracker networks
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Quality is terrible. I dunno what it is because apparently I’m not even one of the people that can tell the difference between 128 and 256, but the same song in Plexamp at 320 vs Spotify whatever is night and day, especially on bad car speakers.
I haven’t used the service in years and that’s just off the top of my head why Spotify is terrible.
Some of these are valid, especially #6 and #7
But a lot of them, frankly, just aren’t true:
- Can’t turn off album art or colorized elements changing bright colors while driving
You can turn off the flashy moving stuff entirely with one setting, if you get distracted by a static album art image while driving then you really should be using a hardware device to control playback instead tbh
1a. The last straw for me was when they deprecated car mode entirely
Car mode is still here, and works perfectly well - in fact they’ve improved the visual clarity recently to make it even clearer
- Can’t combine your own music
They won’t host it for you, but you can absolutely combine the music on your local device with your local library
- No normalization adjustments for songs that are too loud or too quiet
There is a setting for exactly this. I personally think there’s something to be said for not modifying songs in the background though
- No per-device (or at all iirc?) Equalization
Yes there is, afaik it’s per-device only
- Periodic check-in required
Ehh, this one’s kinda fair from a business perspective - it makes sense that the platform would need to verify your subscription occasionally for licensing reasons, but I can see why this would be mildly annoying if you use it very infrequently and are eg on a plane
- Constant background app openings
I’m not sure I can say I’ve seen any issue with this, but if you really don’t like it being active in the background, you can just turn off Spotify Connect in the background in settings
- Quality is terrible
If the audio quality is audibly bad then it’s likely due to not using the very high audio quality setting, or automatic quality adjustment due to network conditions (again, you can turn this off though it may result in buffering)
Honestly, I don’t think playing music through the worst speaker you can find is a reasonable way to assess the audio quality - like yeah, no shit it’s going to be bad. “Doctor doctor, it hurts when I do this”
Tldr: just look at settings lol
I did say it had been a couple of years, and this was all true when I stopped using it a few years back.
- Yeah some album art is pretty distracting, especially when it goes from dark to light at a song switch. You can’t tell me that I’m the only one that might distract while driving.
1a.Car mode deprication in 2021 without a replacement at the time: https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/26/22803670/spotify-retiring-car-view-android-mobile-playback-auto-driving
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Yes there’s a global toggle, but if it is not to your liking, there’s no way to take X song and boost it 20%.
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Per device as in per-bluetooth, not per-app. When you have bad car speakers but good headphones you might want wildly different EQs.
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If memory serves, I did try that. It still opened itself constantly. Most people probably aren’t monitoring background activities on their phones, but it was like 15-30wakelocks/hr just to exist.
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This was with hq on. And automatic adjustment off. I can’t describe it other than flat and crunchy but there’s something to it, or at least there was in ~2021
#2 would kill it for me. I have plenty of music in AM that isn’t available to stream on any service. A lot of older stuff isn’t available on streaming.
Apple Music is the best music platform by far due to clean and simple focus and UI, performance, and also lyrics. Unfortunately, it still sucks in all the ways that streaming inherently sucks though, combined with its intention to suck you into the Apple world.
Everyone I know uses Spotify
The best streaming service is my selfhosted Jellyfin. I serve me no ads and I’m 100% sure I don’t do any shady business with my data.
I had a 3 month trial, that I cancelled in two days. Apple music does not play a lot of songs. Why show them to me when I’m not allowed to hear them? Youtube music works really well, and I am using an iphone!
I love how no one still knows about Deezer even though it’s been around since 2007. Best bang for the buck.
Used Deezer for two yeers. It sucked ass, cause half the time it didnt work (deleted offline songs, had a too low limit for how many songs could be downloaded, app in offline mode was nearly useless).
In the end I switched to spotify. Only miss the mixing stuff, that was kind of nice.
I mean, FOSS YouTube music clients + FOSS downloaders and maybe a system wide adblocker can never get wrong
