• review

One Year of Apple Music

Published on February 23rd, 2025, 873 words, 4 minutes to read

One year ago, after some consideration, I decided to switch to Apple Music, away from Spotify. I'll discuss my experience and thoughts on Apple Music in this post!

Why switch away from Spotify?

There are a multitude of reasons. Most people already know the awful pay, etc., but that was not even the final straw for me because if I really want to support an artist, I buy their music elsewhere, like physically or on Bandcamp. That's what I still do to this day.

I use streaming services for their convenience of being portable (I don't have to carry my hundreds of gigabytes collection with me), and I also like the algorithmic playlists, which sometimes get me to discover new artists or artists I haven't heard of before. That's why Spotify has become annoying in recent years.

In the middle of 2023, I started getting a lot of unrelated artists in my Discover Weekly and Release Radar playlists, things that were placed really high because Spotify thought they matched my tastes. So what happened? Some weird Cloud rapper based some really awful tracks on top of the Evangelion soundtrack and always included Shiro Sagisu as an artist. As I listened to a lot of Evangelion OST then, Spotify assumed that I was interested in that feature of Shiro.

For some reason, it's always terrible rappers that do this. Another case where this happened is when some other artists made tracks, including Hatsune Miku, Supercell, goreshit (which is veeery specific), and more in the artist credits, 16 in total. And because I listen to most of those, it was a top track recommended for me.

No matter how often you tell Spotify you dislike that type of music, new strategies to fool the algorithm come around. And as the recommendations became more and more unusable, I thought about just switching platforms. Most artists just use distribution services to get their music on any streaming platform. So, as I'm already deep in that ecosystem, my sights fell on Apple Music.

The music selection

As mentioned above, for the most part, this is the same as on every platform. That said, in some cases, especially really old releases, Apple Music tends to have some more music available. A good example of this is This Binary Universe by BT, which I could never listen to on Spotify (however, that might have changed because there was a re-release of the album, which probably also landed on Spotify).

Additionally, you can access the iTunes Store catalog through Apple Music if you fancy buying older releases (and I still own some from my iPod days).

I also love the feature that anything I include in Apple Music, including local music, gets automatically synced to every other device. I have learned that Spotify also somewhat supports this, but when I tried to open my local music collection with Spotify, I only remember it slowing down to a crawl or crashing entirely.

Regarding suggestions for new artists and the variety of algorithmic playlists, Apple Music has the basics and some additional things. Still, it does not go as far as Spotify (which is also acceptable).

Clients

Getting everything started on my phone was easy as pie since Apple Music is integrated into the regular music player. On the desktop, I was a bit scared as I heard the wildest stories regarding Apple Music's state on Mac, among other things.

When I installed Apple Music on my Windows machine, I was surprised to see that it is built using WinRT/UWP, which makes it a native app. Of course, many views are still backed by web functionality, but it's not an all-out web frame. This is even funnier to me, considering some newer Windows apps, like Teams, are just Electron apps. So, you have a competitor making native apps on your own platform.

However, I quickly switched away from Apple Music due to one thing missing that I like to use: Scrobbling to last.fm. No practical use aside from "number goes up," but I like looking back on what I listened to. I quickly stumbled upon Cider, an alternative client built by a group supporting the platform with various additional things (and also available on Mac/Linux). Contrary to the official app, this one is backed by Electron, but the performance is good and has many nifty features.

Features

Additionally, Apple Music has some extra features that I find nifty but don't really are necessities of day-to-day use:

• The lyrics are integrated nicely (both in Apple Music and Cider). However, Spotify has increasingly tried to eliminate them in recent years.
• The karaoke feature that removes sung lyrics from songs is quite impressive! I don't sing along to songs, but on a technical level, it at least is.
• Music Haptics is also a fun feature, just without use for myself.

I'm satisfied with the service and'll stick with it. If anything changes, I'll mention that here (or on social media)!