Here are all the advantages of Apple Music over Spotify in 2023.
When it comes to choosing a service, it’s a close race between Spotify Premium and Apple Music, but Apple Music has several benefits over Spotify premium. This is thanks to hi-res lossless and spatial audio albums, and the deep integration with Apple ecosystem. Let’s check all the advantages of Apple Music over Spotify in details.
Advantages of Apple Music Over Spotify
Here are 10 reasons why Apple’s audio service has a lot of big advantages over Spotify and other popular competitors:
1. Advantages of Apple Music over Spotify: Music library
Apple Music and Spotify both feature massive libraries, but Apple claims the advantage with “over 100 million” songs to Spotify’s “over 80 million.”
One hundred million songs — it’s a number that will continue to grow and exponentially multiply. But it’s more than just a number, representing something much more significant — the tectonic shift in the business of music making and distribution over these past two decades.
2. Advantages of Apple Music over Spotify: Lossless Audio
One area where Apple Music has big advantage over Spotify is in sound quality. Apple Music offers Lossless Audio. Spotify doesn’t.
There’s a difference in terms of quality for listening to that music if you look at bitrates. Spotify’s apps offer an Ogg Vorbis stream quality equivalent to 160kbps for free users, while its premium service goes up to 320kbps.
Apple Music’s standard bitrate is lower at 256kbps for AAC streams, but it’s not the end of the story. There’s Lossless to take into account.
Apple launched Lossless as its high-definition audio option, which offers music at a higher fidelity than normal. This includes two quality levels: 24-bit/48kHz Lossless and 24-bit/192kHz Hi-Res Lossless.
To chuck around these higher quantities of bits means a higher amount of bandwidth is required. For Apple Music Lossless, that means a bitrate of up to 1,411kbps, much higher than usual.
The major caveat here is that you need the proper hardware to listen to Lossless audio. Lossless doesn’t work over Bluetooth, and even Apple admits that even its super-expensive AirPods Max headphones won’t support it, even when connected with a wire. That said, even when listening primarily on wireless earbuds while using an iPhone, I found that most songs sounded louder and brighter on Apple Music compared to Spotify.
Spotify did say it would introduce a similar high-fidelity service, named Spotify HiFi, but it failed to launch despite its promotion, and it was delayed indefinitely.
3. Advantages of Apple Music Over Spotify: Spatial Audio
Another advantage of Apple Music over Spotify is Spatial Audio. Apple Music offers Spatial Audio. Spotify doesn’t.
This works like a surround sound system in your earbuds, with the audio mapped out in the physical space around you. Apple is working with artists to specifically engineer their songs to take full advantage of the vast soundscape provided by the clever tech. Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos is included at no extra cost and automatically kicks-in whenever you’re listening with a Spatial Audio-compatible device, including the new third-generation AirPods, AirPods Pro, AirPods Pro 2, and AirPods Max.
4. Advantages of Apple Music Over Spotify: Cloud locker
Apple Music’s biggest special feature is the iCloud Music Library, accessed through iTunes, which allows collectors to access their libraries of tracks in AAC 256kbps wherever they go when signed in with the same Apple ID. Apple Music has a key advantage over Spotify in that you can combine the songs you already own with the Apple Music streaming catalog.
If you turn on iCloud Music Library within Apple Music, you can access your personal library of tunes across all your devices (from the PC to the phone). This feature “matches” songs in your library with those in the iTunes catalog, or uploads them if the song isn’t available, so you can listen to your music wherever you’re signed in with your Apple ID. You can store up to 100,000 songs.
Note that iTunes Match is also available even without an Apple Music subscription for $25 a year.
Spotify also lets you play music from your device in the Spotify app, but it only works for local files so they aren’t stored in the cloud. So it’s a less elegant solution.
5. Advantages of Apple Music over Spotify: Cool ways to dive deep on an artist
While Spotify is pretty easier to navigate than Apple Music, the Apple Music app has few advantages that will make your inner music nerd happy. Certain album pages feature animated artwork, and some are even accompanied by a full article that provides a deeper dive on the music straight from the artist. When browsing an artist’s catalog, you’ll also see links to any Apple Music Radio shows they’ve been featured on.
Speaking of which, Apple Music Radio is one of the service’s best features. You’ll get live radio shows from top industry personalities like Zane Lowe and Ebro as well as no shortage of on-demand interviews to discover from artists big and small. Spotify offers auto-generated radio stations based on specific artists and genres as well as prerecorded podcasts with songs mixed in, but it doesn’t quite have the same type of live content — or the same big names.
6. Advantages of Apple Music Over Spotify: Apple Music is a good value
Apple Music starts at $9.99 per month, which is pretty standard for a music streaming service. But it’s an especially great value if you get an Apple One bundle, which gets you Apple Music, Apple TV , Apple Arcade and iCloud with 50GB of storage for $14.99. If you own an Apple device and plan on using the company’s various subscription services, it’s a no-brainer.
Apple Music and Spotify’s family plans are generally comparable, letting up to six users share an account for $15 to $16 per month. But if you want more than just music for your money, Apple’s got the best deal out right now.
7. Advantages of Apple Music Over Spotify: Videos
Apple does a lot more with video, offering music videos alongside tracks, documentaries, and other content. Spotify does provide limited video, such as video podcast playback and some exclusive content, but it’s certainly not as far along as Apple’s offering.
8. Advantages of Apple Music Over Spotify: Integration with Apple’s ecosystem
As you would expect, Siri works with Apple Music so you can ask her to play today’s hits and she will do just that. You can ask Siri to “play the top songs from 2021”, “play more songs like this”, “add the new Drake album to my library”, “play all songs by Drake” (to listen to all of Drake’s music, even if it’s not in your library), and “play my music by Drake” (to hear Drake’s songs that you have saved to your library). You can also ask Siri to shuffle the songs in an album or playlist. There are also a new range of playlists coming that can be controlled via Siri. For these, you could ask Siri to plan music for a dinner party, for example.
While Siri does work with Spotify, Siri is part of iOS, and can thus take advantage of iOS and all aspects of it.
Aside from the aforementioned Siri support, Apple Music provides a relatively large collection of features that could benefit users.
The deep integration with Apple’s ecosystem also helps the service a lot, such as enabling Siri queries to play back anything in the catalog. Accessing the music across all Apple devices, and to hand off between items, such as an iPhone to a HomePod mini, gives even more control over how a user listens to their music.
9. Advantages of Apple Music over Spotify: Social sharing
Both services let you follow your favorite artists to keep up to date with their posts and latest releases.
You can also follow friends. On Spotify, you can see what song your pals are listening to in real-time (if they choose to share this detail) on the desktop app.
Spotify Codes are a way to share tracks, albums and playlists among friends. It’s kind of like a custom QR code that you can scan with the camera in Spotify if you’re listening in the same location, or share through messages if you’re apart.
Many popular musicians seem to be more active in posting updates on Apple Music and it’s easier to find that content than it is on Spotify.
Naturally, you can also follow your friends and see what they’re up to across both platforms. While it’s much easier to find profiles on Apple Music than it is on Spotify, you do have to already have your friends in your contacts list (or on Facebook) to follow them.
10. Advantages of Apple Music Over Spotify: Music Discovery
Everyone has heard big things about Spotify’s algorithm that helps its users to discover new music. It’s been a huge hit amongst its users and results in new playlists every week that are tailor-made around the listening habits of a particular user.
However, Apple Music has another approach in which instead of using an algorithm to create playlists for you, it employs real people to do the hard work.
This may well appeal to those of us out there who prefer a human touch when it comes to having our music selected for us.
Apple Music is proud that the curated playlists that they provide have been designed by actual people instead of machine learning algorithms and it’s clear that many users prefer their method.
Conclusion
Apple Music has many advantages over Spotify. Apple has a huge music catalog and integrates seamlessly with other music libraries, has an enormous subscriber community, and delivers a great sound quality.
If you’re an Apple user with lots of music in your library, Apple Music offers a great experience and you’ll prefer the continuity in interface.