Spotify

With its emphasis on music — no podcasts or audiobooks — Apple Music doesn’t need a complicated interface. That said, the way the app works hasn’t changed much since the service first appeared in 2015, whether it’s for desktop or for mobile devices. Call it consistency, perhaps. Starting at the bottom of the mobile app, you’ll find it broken into separate sections: Home, New (playlists and discover content), Radio, Library and Search. While Spotify has gone almost completely algorithm-based for its “For You” section, Apple still has a good number of old-fashioned radio stations, including Beat

With over 100 million tracks to choose from, across the entire history of recorded music, it goes without saying that sound quality is going to be variable. While one may assume that, as all of the services now do lossless, they all sound the same. It’s possible, and while I haven’t tested the services against each other recently, I did do so when Spotify only offered a maximum audio quality of 320kbps. In that test, I wanted to test two main things: the differences between Apple lossless, “lossy” Spotify and Apple’s selection of spatial albums. The differences may surprise you! On the first p

With virtually identical music catalogs and pricing, the music service that you pick will inevitably be the one that best suits your needs. It could be that it comes down to those feature differences I mentioned in the beginning. I would argue that Spotify has the greatest claim to being an “essential” music service as it’s the most platform-agnostic, thanks to Spotify Connect, and has a wide range of entertainment options extending to audiobooks.  The fact that Apple Music works best for iPhone users is the biggest point in its favor, and probably the most attractive “feature” that it has. Th