Spotify and Apple are close competitors, but there’s a clear winner

Graphic by Sarah Thomas

The feud between Spotify and Apple is as old as streaming itself… but it's time for it to end.

On one fateful day at the end of each year, Spotify releases its Spotify Wrapped statistics, sparking a mass posting on social media or debate over the aspects of the design of Wrapped itself. Regardless, Spotify Wrapped generates discourse without fail year-round and has even inspired a similar feature from Apple Music: AppleReplay.

The conflict between and debate over Spotify and Apple Music is as old as music streaming itself — but for me, having used both platforms, the answer is as clear as day. Spotify is the winner.

Both Spotify and Apple Music offer a standard subscription of $9.99 per month, but Spotify offers a free, ad-supported subscription whereas Apple does not. However, Apple offers a “voice-only” option that costs $4.99 monthly — it can only be accessed by asking Siri to play a track, which confuses me because I don’t understand who would want that. And while Spotify’s student version is cheaper ($4.99 to Apple’s $5.99), Apple’s family plan is cheaper ($14 to Spotify’s $15.99), but allows for one user less (5 for Apple Music and 6 for Spotify). In my opinion, Spotify’s pricing wins. Disregarding the idiocy that is Apple’s voice-only option, Spotify is cheaper and accommodates larger families.

After considering the price, content is another metric that informs a consumer’s choice between two products. Spotify is notorious for underpaying its artists and was recently faced with scrutiny for platforming controversial podcaster Joe Rogan, leading multiple artists like Joni Mitchell and Neil Young to remove their content from Spotify.

Apple Music has a larger library than Spotify, leading by more than 20 million tracks. Apple’s over 100 million tracks do not include podcasts, whereas 2.6 million of Spotify’s 80 million are podcasts.

However, podcasts themselves are solely available on Apple Podcasts, while Spotify users can listen to podcasts in the Spotify app — which is one of the many reasons I’m a die-hard Spotify defender … imagine downloading a separate app just to listen to podcasts.

Spotify’s most important strength is its curated playlist selection. Apple Music fails to offer more than three or four curated playlists, while Spotify offers a playlist for nearly every combination of words I can look up: “Melancholy Jazz Mix,” “Sleepy Morning Mix” and more. Even though I’ve only used Apple Music for approximately a month in 2018, its personalized selection left a lot to be desired and rarely introduced me to new music the way that Spotify does.

Personally, Spotify’s reduced library doesn’t impact my daily listening — the majority of popular artists are available on Spotify and I have no trouble finding more obscure artists as well. Unless the music you listen to is extremely underground, you should have no problem with listening to music on Spotify.

Spotify also gives a user more information about each track and artist: A new update allows users to view Live Lyrics, artist information, biography and monthly listeners as well as a Discover More feature that tags the genres, moods or other identifying characteristics of the song. Clicking on one of these tags takes you to a mix created with other songs that fall into that category while also being similar to your tastes.

For example, if you’re listening to the song “New Light” by John Mayer, the tags for the song include #sunday morning, #chill and #light, all of which have their own playlists with related tracks.

This feature has brought tears to my eyes many times. I’ve discovered so many of my favorite songs through this, and can’t thank Spotify enough. This leads me to the real reason Apple Music just can’t compare: Spotify is constantly innovating and introducing new features that improve listening and discovering new music and artists.

Spotify’s display is better, more people I know use it (I love stalking the Friend Activity bar on Spotify) and Spotify allows you to personalize your experience entirely. For all of these reasons, I’ll be a Spotify user until I get so old and crinkly that I can’t press the bright green play button anymore.