Which is Better: Spotify or Apple Music?

Apple Music or Spotify? When you need to subscribe a proper streaming music service, it’s always hard to choose the right one from these two option. At the current music market, Spotify has been the leading market all the time. But since Apple Music released in September 2015, it gradually becomes the largest competitor with Spotify. Thus, to help you make decision better, we spent some time to make a comparison between Apple Music and Spotify. Then let's take a look.

Part 1. Basic Comparison: Price, Sound Quality and Exclusives

Price: • Apple Music: $9.99/month for one user; $14.99 for a family plan of up to six • Spotify: $9.99 per month ($4.99 for students). Both Apple Music and Spotify offers the three-month trial. But the trial with full functionality of Spotify need to pay $0.99 while Apple Music is totally free. The big difference between the two services is that Spotify has a free, ad-supported basic service whereas Apple Music does not. Sound Quality: Apple Music: • Regular: 128kbps AAC (Audio purchased from iTunes Store before) • High Quality: 256kbps AAC Spotify: • Normal: 96kbps OGG • High: 160kbps OGG • Extreme: 320kbps OGG Another important point for streaming music service is sound quality. But due to the different encoding format, it is hard to compare their sound quality at corresponding levels. However, some people will still prefer to subscribe to Spotify for its highest-quality option. Exclusives: Offering exclusive content is one of the ways to attract users for music streaming services. With iTunes, Apple Music can get many exclusive content before anyone else. In a short time, Apple Music gets the exclusive music from Taylor Swift, Lil Yachty, Usher, Frank Ocean, among others. But Spotify doesn’t offering many exclusives for uses. If you love exclusive, Apple Music is the best choice for you.

Part 2. Other Features Comparison Tablet

	Apple Music	Spotify
Platform	Mac, iOS,   Windows (via iTunes), Apple TV, Android	Windows, Mac,   iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, Roku, TiVo, Samsung Smart TVs,   Linux, PlayStation, the Web, and more
How many   countries	113 countries	60 countries
Number of   music tracks	30 million+	30 million+
Podcasts	No	Yes
Videos	Music videos,   clips uploaded by artists	Yes
Beats1 Radio	Yes	No
Connect   between Artists and Fans	Yes	No

When it comes to the music collection, both Apple Music and Spotify are relatively evenly matched. But Apple Music features the Beats1 Radio to discover good artists and music. If you want to explore the latest and unique music, you should go for Apple Music.

Drawing Conclusion:

Now, do you know which one should you choose? From the highest level, there are no big difference between Apple Music and Spotify. For most people, they will probably go for Apple Music due to its creatively service, but Spotify is thoroughly deserving of your consideration to – with its more intuitive interface, podcast and unique video content. Whatever music service you choose, hope you can get a great music enjoyment. By the way, if you subscribed to Apple Music, you may get annoyed with the DRM protection. You can try to use Apple Music Converter to help you remove DRM from Apple Music tracks and then convert them to MP3, AC3, FLAC, etc. Meanwhile, it will preserve the original audio quality and ID3 tags for you. Related Article: How to Remove DRM from Apple Music