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Apple Music isn't the best streaming music service — it's just the least annoying
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this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
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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.
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.
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)
No normalization adjustments for songs that are too loud or too quiet
No per-device (or at all iirc?) Equalization
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.
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
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:
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
Car mode is still here, and works perfectly well - in fact they've improved the visual clarity recently to make it even clearer
They won't host it for you, but you can absolutely combine the music on your local device with your local library
There is a setting for exactly this. I personally think there's something to be said for not modifying songs in the background though
Yes there is, afaik it's per-device only
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
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
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.
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
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%.
Per device as in per-bluetooth, not per-app. When you have bad car speakers but good headphones you might want wildly different EQs.
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.
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.