> I like Apple Music because it integrates well with the Apple line.
Is there a need to integrate with anything? All I need is to play music. Spotify is as integrated into macOS and iOS as Apple Music.
> More importantly though it is one of the highest paying per stream to artists [1]. Streaming needs to be much more lucrative for artists and consumer choice helps that.
Too bad they are shooting themselves in the foot by neglecting user experience.
I do like a more open/api platform and wish Apple was, but Spotify probably won't be for long. Tracking my plays takes more work with everything to closed.
Apple misses some of the obscure stuff but I will always side with the higher payer to artists. I also like just being able to buy albums I like and support artists.
Comments like this one are a real puzzler to me. Why does it matter that the higher royalty is not out of altruism? It’s money! Money doesn’t care. More money for artists is good. You can’t buy a cheeseburger with altruism.
I guess I’m just not sure what sort of “gotcha” this is supposed to be. The beauty of incentive alignment is that you don’t have to waste your time trying to discern nebulous motivations of large groups of people.
> Comments like this one are a real puzzler to me. Why does it matter that the higher royalty is not out of altruism? It’s money! Money doesn’t care. More money for artists is good. You can’t buy a cheeseburger with altruism.
All the money that streaming services pay out goes to copyright holders. Guess who the copyright holders are. If you say "artists", think again. For the absolute vast majority of music it's the Big Four/Three: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry#Consolidation
So, when the likes of Spotify pay 60-70% of their revenue to the record labels, and the artists get peanuts... Spotify (and Tidal, and Apple Music, and...) get blamed. Now this is a real puzzler.
If they just sold it, then no? They might get more for their next sale, though I imagine the count of streams is more influential for that than the revenue per stream
Because if royalties are function of licensing volume, it makes no difference who you choose. If more people ditched Spotify for Apple Music, they’d start getting more favorable rates with record labels.
If you really wanted to help artists, it would make the most sense to use whichever service is cheapest and then donate the difference to artists. But, personally I’d just go with whoever provides the best user experience, which is none of them, so I basically haven’t listened to music aside from occasional YouTube chill beats for years.
The integration with HomePod is very nice, I can just go ”Hey Siri, play Tom Waits” or whatever. Maybe that works with Spotify, I dunno, but the integration with Apple Music is obviously seamless, it just works.
I have to disagree with this. I have endless issues switching the playback between my iPhone and HomePod, sometimes I’ll have to quit the app just to get the right device to play music. When I’m playing the song on my iPhone with playback on the HomePod it sometimes ‘forgets’ the HomePod is the playback device and using the controls on the iPhone to pause the song etc do nothing forcing me to use Siri to stop playback on the HomePod. Not to mention how useless Siri is when asking to play certain things (e.g. trying to play an album that has a song with the same name on it). I generally like the HomePod but the integration (and Siri in general) are massively lacking.
I’ve had similar issues with HomePod when it comes to other apps (e.g. playing podcasts from Overcast using AirPlay), but the Apple Music integration has never been a problem, that has always just worked. Siri sometimes gets confused about what you’re asking (as with all these systems), but it’s less than I expected and at an acceptible rate for me.
Yep, until a couple years ago you had to say “Hey Siri, play Tom Waits on Spotify,” otherwise it would always try Apple Music even if you didn’t have a subscription or the app wasn’t installed. But they changed it - probably for antitrust reasons, like you said - and now it’s pretty seamless.
Music is included in Apple One Premier along with TV, News, Fitness, Arcade, and 2TB iCloud Drive. All these things integrate well within the Apple ecosystem and family sharing. One Premier is honestly one of the best value subscriptions in tech today.
However, I do think it’s anti-competitive. Spotify, for example, has absolutely no possible way to get my business until and unless my entire family were to ditch Apple.
I don’t like the Music UI but I’ve come to understand how to use it and it no longer bothers me.
My phone does that on the lock screen too, but it works it out from sampling sound, so it "integrates" with everything from someone's AppleTV to an Alexa.
Is there a need to integrate with anything? All I need is to play music. Spotify is as integrated into macOS and iOS as Apple Music.
> More importantly though it is one of the highest paying per stream to artists [1]. Streaming needs to be much more lucrative for artists and consumer choice helps that.
Too bad they are shooting themselves in the foot by neglecting user experience.