Spotify or Apple Music or YouTube Music Premium?

Your preferred music streaming service


  • Total voters
    64
I subscribed to YTMusic premium but when casting to AVR via FireTV box it's not at all reliable. Spotify connect or even regular YouTube for that matter works perfectly well.

I wonder if it's only me or it's a problem with the app itself.
 
I subscribed to YTMusic premium but when casting to AVR via FireTV box it's not at all reliable. Spotify connect or even regular YouTube for that matter works perfectly well.

I wonder if it's only me or it's a problem with the app itself.

I faced the same issue while casting YT Music Premium on CXN. It was random occurrence and I couldn’t identify the cause. It was a big reason I didn’t renew though I had started liking their collection.

If you find a reason and solution, please post it.
 
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Having subscribed to spotify's premium service after evaluating both apple & spotify, I can say that spotify is much better. The play list is quite intuitive in spotify. SQ is excellent and got it at economical price. Can't say about privacy concerns as of now but if it's there then it's a matter of concern.
 
I am considering moving to Spotify, have some challenges beyond my control :D . My wife, and few family members are using my Apple Music subscription, so cannot discontinue it!!! you know the look when things don't work ;)
I think there are some offers as well on Spotify annual. Will see if that makes sense for me....right now just tooooo many app/services subscriptions :(
 
Was comparing Apple Music vs. Youtube Premium Music and some tracks on youtube seem to be marginally better. But these tracks are labelled as FLAC / hi-res etc. Question arises that are these tracks truly hi-res as claimed and is youtube capable of streaming that bitrate?
 
Currently apple music is better then spotify especially in india as many songs are missing in spotify
 
Tidal has released DD Atmos format for few selected albums. I use JioSaavn and Spotify most of the times. Wanted to try AM and YT after reading the feedbacks.
 
I have subscription to all three. What is good and bad

1. Spotify.
Good - The best designed interface, miles ahead of apple and google. The playback mechanism is well designed. Spotify pulls the music file from the server and plays it directly to the playback device. There is direct communication between the playback device and the spotify server. Spotify shows the same song, same information on each and every device.
Bad - Honestly just the lack of lossless and hi-res. The day spotify comes with this, there won't be even one advantage of having apple music.
OS support: Windows (official), Linux (official via snap), Mac (official), BSD (3rd party)

2 Apple Music
Good: Hi Res available for few tracks. By Hi-Res I mean anything sampled at 96 kHz and above. Availibility of lossless content is also plus.
Bad: Bad design. Mediocre design of playing at fixed sample rate on macbooks, mac mini, apple tv. Devices played at fixed sample rate only when the dinosaurs were alive but apple does it even in this age. Correct design only on ipads and iphones. Music is played on the end device using multiple hops. First the device playing apple music pulls the song from the apple server and then pushes it to the playback device. If the playback device is not the one running apple music app, then you are losing quality. Quality sucks on non-ios devices like macbook, mac mini, apple tv, windows/linux laptops. Extremely difficult to play bit perfect music. Also every device running Apple music app will show different song, different information. Spotify does this beautifully allowing you to switch between devices without losing the song being played and the context. There is just two use cases where apple music beats spotify in quality. That is when you are running apple music app on an ipad or an iphone with a good dac connected to the usb-c port. The moment you switch to a macbook, mac mini, laptop that advantage over spotify is lost. There is one more use case for apple music. That is when you are using Airport Express and the content from Apple Music is sampled at 44.1 kHz (which happens to be the major content that AM has). AFAIK only @sachinchavan 15865 and myself use airport express.
OS Support: IOS (official), OSX (official), limited to 44.1 kHz on Linux running non-official shairport-sync

3. Youtube
Good: User content
Bad: everything else
OS Support: Official Via Google Chrome brower or google cast plugins. Quality will never be at par with AM or Spotify as there is no native OS support. Plenty of non-official hacks which download the content and then do the playback.
 
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I have subscription to all three. What is good and bad

1. Spotify.
Good - The best designed interface, miles ahead of apple and google. The playback mechanism is well designed. Spotify pulls the music file from the server and plays it directly to the playback device. There is direct communication between the playback device and the spotify server. Spotify shows the same song, same information on each and every device.
Bad - Honestly just the lack of lossless and hi-res. The day spotify comes with this, there won't be even one advantage of having apple music.
OS support: Windows (official), Linux (official via snap), Mac (official), BSD (3rd party)

2 Apple Music
Good: Hi Res available for few tracks. By Hi-Res I mean anything sampled at 96 kHz and above. Availibility of lossless content is also plus.
Bad: Bad design. Mediocre design of playing at fixed sample rate on macbooks, mac mini, apple tv. Devices played at fixed sample rate only when the dinosaurs were alive but apple does it even in this age. Correct design only on ipads and iphones. Music is played on the end device using multiple hops. First the device playing apple music pulls the song from the apple server and then pushes it to the playback device. If the playback device is not the one running apple music app, then you are losing quality. Quality sucks on non-ios devices like macbook, mac mini, apple tv, windows/linux laptops. Extremely difficult to play bit perfect music. Also every device running Apple music app will show different song, different information. Spotify does this beautifully allowing you to switch between devices without losing the song being played and the context. There is just two use cases where apple music beats spotify in quality. That is when you are running apple music app on an ipad or an iphone with a good dac connected to the usb-c port. The moment you switch to a macbook, mac mini, laptop that advantage over spotify is lost. There is one more use case for apple music. That is when you are using Airport Express and the content from Apple Music is sampled at 44.1 kHz (which happens to be the major content that AM has). AFAIK only @sachinchavan 15865 and myself use airport express.
OS Support: IOS (official), OSX (official), limited to 44.1 kHz on Linux running non-official shairport-sync

3. Youtube
Good: User content
Bad: everything else
OS Support: Official Via Google Chrome brower or google cast plugins. Quality will never be at par with AM or Spotify as there is no native OS support. Plenty of non-official hacks which download the content and then do the playback.
Can vouch for Apple Music via AirPort Express. My go-to streaming app for last 1-2 years was Spotify, especially because of the Spotify Connect on my Cambridge CXN streamer, but the lossless & hi-res Apple Music, as played via AirPort Express connected to CXN via optical cable is way ahead in richness and has become my go-to streaming service. I won’t be renewing Spotify anymore.

Apple Music also is the cheapest of the lot, at just Rs 99 pm. What more, it also includes subscription for the ‘Classical’ app which is what Apple made out of Primephonic that they acquired couple of years ago. Another pro or Apple Music is the music videos - they are excellent quality - I play them via Apple TV on my TV and stereo system.

Another pro of Apple Music are the inbuilt equaliser options which work fine (not useful for me as I don’t like to alter the original sound)

YouTube is another app I highly rely on for music - but mostly for the following:

- Live performances uploaded by organisers and public - millions of them. Nothing beats this if you want to deep dive into a genre you like, lots of indie content.

- Chitrahaar/Chhayageet like experience - watching old film songs on TV with the audio played through the stereo system using combination of Apple TV and CXN’s DAC. Surprisingly, audio in many cases is better than that on the audio album itself because it was perhaps not remastered.

There’s YouTube Music app too, which comes with the above subscription, but that’s not of much use to me.

Spotify has an appeal for those who like its user interface (I find it too cluttered, AM’s is cleaner) and like listening to podcasts (a real differentiator, but not my thing).
 
In my opinion, and for my use case, this is one of the most significant advantages that Spotify has.
The playback mechanism is well designed. Spotify pulls the music file from the server and plays it directly to the playback device.
My phone, which has the app is not streaming the music file over my wifi network to the playback device. It's only like a remote. This removes two variables - the phone and wifi network from the chain and makes for a more stable and glitch free experience than Apple.
 
In my opinion, and for my use case, this is one of the most significant advantages that Spotify has.

My phone, which has the app is not streaming the music file over my wifi network to the playback device. It's only like a remote. This removes two variables - the phone and wifi network from the chain and makes for a more stable and glitch free experience than Apple.
Yes. It is a far superior design and that's how all streaming service should work. For this kind of design the manufacturer will have to write a component that plays the sound on all operating systems. The spotify client just instructs the end device to pull the song from the spotify server and after that the entire business happens between the playback device and the spotify server. The music continues to play even if you quite the spotify interface.

In case of AM, the apple music client pulls the song from the apple server and pushes the song to the play back device. This it acts like a middle man and the moment you stop this middle man, music stops.
 
In my opinion, and for my use case, this is one of the most significant advantages that Spotify has.

My phone, which has the app is not streaming the music file over my wifi network to the playback device. It's only like a remote. This removes two variables - the phone and wifi network from the chain and makes for a more stable and glitch free experience than Apple.
There are definite advantages of Spotify Connect’s native play. But a few days of lossless streaming at 99 Rs pm via AM (and A/B comparisons), and I was a convert. The musicality of a lossless file is difficult to achieve with a 256/320 kbps stream. Yes, the SQ (esp clarity) of the native Spotify stream is better (expectedly, due to fewer stages in the playback), but for me the richness & musicality of the full content scored over cleaner sounding but incomplete content. it depends on what one values more. (My preference is stated in my signature :))
 
The musicality of a lossless file is difficult to achieve with a 256/320 kbps stream
Agree, but I feel there are too many hoops to jump through to get there with Apple music. I understand that you have achieved the best possible result with Airport express. Maybe that's a route I will try sometime...
 
Agree, but I feel there are too many hoops to jump through to get there with Apple music. I understand that you have achieved the best possible result with Airport express. Maybe that's a route I will try sometime...
Of course the best things that can happen are:
- either Spotify launches lossless service, or
- Apple allows native streaming

Not sure if either (especially the latter) is likely to happen. The third, but again remote hope is that Tidal/Qobuz launch service (officially) in India.
 
Of course the best things that can happen are:
- either Spotify launches lossless service, or
- Apple allows native streaming

Not sure if either (especially the latter) is likely to happen. The third, but again remote hope is that Tidal/Qobuz launch service (officially) in India.
Yes , all unlikely hopes.
I have some small hope of Spotify going lossless, at least there was some talk in going around sometime ago.
 
Of course the best things that can happen are:
- either Spotify launches lossless service, or
- Apple allows native streaming

Not sure if either (especially the latter) is likely to happen. The third, but again remote hope is that Tidal/Qobuz launch service (officially) in India.
Most likely it won't happen. Till date apple has not release API that works on any OS other than IOS, OSX.

The reason why spotify has native streaming capability for almost all know OS is because they had released libspotify C library. In 2015 Spotify announced that they will stop working on the library. But they gave developers 7 years time to come with alternatives. So there are more than 1 alternative to the official libspotify https://developer.spotify.com/blog/2022-04-12-libspotify-sunset.

I use librespot on all my laptop, mac mini, macbook and rasperry pi to pull the music from the spotify server and play it directly to the DAC connected to the devices. I can also play the music directly on my TV sets without requiring a computer, laptop to be continuously running the spotify client.
 
I have been using Spotify Primarily as my main Audio Player; but I have synced all playlists using Soundiiz, as apple music is part of my Apple One plan so no additional cost for me.

I love Spotify for reasons already mentioned - Spotify Connect (chef's kiss), UI, Song Radio (finger licking good), I rarely come across a song that is not on Spotify, ease of finding songs, Suggestions & the fact that it learns your preferences well. That is incredible. The enjoyment quotient with Spotify is just multi fold compared to any other service. Sound quality becomes secondary even though I have a decent enough revealing setup.

I am right now also using Qobuz, but with every passing day my usage is getting lesser due to the painful UI. Yes songs sound great - no bias. But it is a chore to just use it.

Apple music is painful for many other reasons. The song station feature is extremely random at best, kills the mood completely. I am using it ONLY as a Hi-res player on playlists synced with Spotify.

Qobuz aside. The difference between Apple Music & Spotify is not night and day in my opinion if you level match. All songs start louder at the same volume level on Apple Music (sometimes as much as 5+ DB average), so if you level match (to 1DB+/-) & then play - it is hard to tell any differences. It is not a clear - I prefer this or that. Some songs sound great on Spotify, others on Apple Music.

Examples -
Memphis Soul Stew - King Curtis - clearly better sounding on AM, the bass lines are very clean, Spotify sounds noisy.
Beggin' - Frank Valli & The Four Seasons - Spotify sounds very clean and taut. Sounds Boomy on AM.
There are many such song by song examples.

So I am not sure if I am hearing a definite advantage on AM. In my opinion, you can't go wrong with either & if you are someone like me; the features on Spotify alone are worth keeping it. AM is not there yet - not even close in terms of user experience.

***These are just opinions :) I am not a 'trained' listener and feature preference is subjective.
 
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