Also thinking of leaving but a lot of albums I like aren’t on there? For example Thursday’s No Devolucion
I used both interchangeably 2015-2020 and have primarily been on Spotify since. Currently using AM again and it’s improved a lot. My thoughts after a few weeks back: Sound quality is higher. Do I hear it enough to make it a deciding fsctor? No. However I use AirPods and Sonos (Some Sonos does play Lossless but you have to do so from their app, which I don’t do often as I prefer being able to control from my Lock Screen) I think people that use a DAC or whatever probably notice if way more. Now playing UI and lyrics are far nicer on Apple Music. Algorithm for adding songs to playlists is awful compared to Spotify. (I.e my 2025 songs on Spotify recommends pretty accurate 2025 songs.. Apple Music recommends the same songs on all my playlists. Yea I love The Middle but it doesn’t belong in every playlist) Playlists are generally pretty basic, don’t use them at all on AM. Lack of Connect really kills me. Removing a song from library also removes it from all your playlists (which given when pre release songs come before an album is announced, is quite common an issue for me) Love being able to “favourite” a song from the Lock Screen. Albums you “favourite” randomly lose that tag. May be an 18.5 bug but it’s persistent. Don’t care for Atmos music at all, so can’t say much on that. Apple Replay updating weekly and giving monthly overviews looks really cool (it’s a shame it’s often woefully inaccurate) Apple TV app for AM is so much better than the heap of crap Spotify stuck on there and ignored since. My attempt at switching is more due to annoying bugs on Spotify they do not seem to care to fix. Not sure if the change will stick, as I’ve been on Spotify since 2011 and the duo plan makes it far cheaper between my wife and I.
If you wanna stay on top of new European music (and I suspect other non-North American regions) through playlists (which is pretty much the main and sometimes only way to do it, since regional music media is dead) then Spotify is the only viable contender sadly. Otherwise I would get Tidal probably. Better than Spotify and Apple in terms of sound (it’s the best comprehensive streaming service for sound quality) as well as for artists.
You can change it so a song doesn't get added to your library when adding to a playlist, getting around this issue.
Yeah I have both save favourites and playlist/add to library off. It’s more for say The Starting Line who have a single out now but no album pre-save. I add that to my library as I’d want it included if shuffling their discography but will inevitably replace that with the album when it comes up to save and lose it in any playlists. By all accounts a major first world problem but just a weird one to have. I don’t think any other music service does it.
It's how I do it, too. This way my favorites get added to the playlist but not to my library. Best way to approach it.
I use Qobuz. Only thing I miss is my discover weekly and new releases. I just use different avenues that now.
when i first tried Apple Music it would often mess up albums in my library, like replacing art I had added with (often wrong) art from their database, and other issues i can’t remember the specifics of right now.
What the hell is Qobuz?? Tell me more! An alternative streaming platform that isn’t Spotify or Apple is definitely intriguing.
Mostly focused on quality. They stream lossless. They are also transparent about how much they pay per stream, as well as having a marketplace where you can buy albums. Definitely focused on albums, not playlists, and discovering new stuff based on what you listen to isn’t really a thing, but they have the vast majority of my collection and only missing a few things.
I'm gonna jump ship pretty soon. Its frankly just daunting thinking about trying to transfer over everything from my library somewhere else since this has been my primary source of music for over a decade. Also would love to find an app that lets me continue to seamlessly scrobble as I listen.
Playlisty and Songshift are two pretty popular ones. The latter is free, I’m not really sure what benefit the former gives you for paying edit: sorry read the above post a little too quickly lol - these are for transferring playlists from one service to another. Not scrobbling
There’s various apps that can do it (QuietScrob on iOS, Neptune’s on Mac) with varying degrees of success. QuietScrob often multiples scrobbles, which is just a pain. I gave up scribbling AM in the end for this try out. I think there’s a third party music app that does it, Soor I think. Although I’m not a fan of using a third party client for my music app but it’s apparently a very good app.
Marvis is also an apparently very reliable third party app used for AM scrobbling. If personal accounts put you at ease, it’s the one that Jason has used for years
Marvis is incredible, I also started using it primarily for last.fm scrobbling, but quickly realized it's better than the native Music app in basically every way