As long as you listen on only your iPhone (or iPad), I prefer AM. Spotify has better recommendations but their treatment of what music is, is like how Instagram treats photography or Amazon treats books.

There’s just no love for music as Spotify; it’s more an engine designed to maximize your engagement with their pool of content.

No one at Spotify would give a shit about a new Beatles remaster or about celebrating the work of a recently deceased artist or whatever - unless it would push the dial on their “DAU metric” or “engagement dashboard”.

Meanwhile AM seems at least interested in making you enjoy the marvel that is music and have you appreciate its cultural impact.

We should rightfully be very skeptical about Apple’s earnestness or ethics when it comes to hard to measure things like “privacy” or “taste”. But I remain convinced that there is still some influence of Steve Jobs and Jimmy Iovine etc. at Apple Music.

One thing Apple Music has over Spotify is that Apple Music allows me to sync sound multi-room using Modipy[1]. It's not a big thing for most people, but it's one of the reasons I'll most likely switch.

[1]: https://mopidy.com/

You can have an automatically updated playlist of likes using smart playlists. You have to create it one time on desktop, but it’s automatic after that.

https://www.idownloadblog.com/2018/12/19/create-smart-playli...

I’m an insane person so I listen to all my liked songs on shuffle and ride the wave of tonal inconsistency, so this feature is very important to me…

Spotify has better cross-platform support.

Apple Music's music upload is great for combining a personal/niche library with the cloud subscription library.

Spotify's music "experience" might still be marginally better, but I feel like things haven't improved, and probably have been trending downwards in favor of podcasts.

Apple Music seems like it's been getting gradually better over time.

Both have download to device support which is nice.

I don't know Apple Music. All I can say is that the recommendations in Spotify are perfect. Seriously, they are so good I end up adding 90% to my playlist. Sometimes I don't even know if I'm still listening to my playlist or Spotifies recommendations based on my playlist.

The Apple Music web app was just flat out broken and unusable when I tried it about a year ago. Like you would click play and a totally different song on the page would start playing. And then the discovery features sucked on AM. Switched to Spotify and have been very happy since.

Spotify definitely has the better recommendation engine. AM has much better quality. I’ve only come across a few artists not available on AM. I only use AM on mobile, so haven’t compared desktop or cross platform. Obviously AM is favoring iPhone users.

None of them. Consider supporting DRM-free music services: https://www.fsf.org/givingguide/v12/ (scroll down).

I'm going to slightly hijack this Ask HN.

Aside from Apple Music, what other streaming music options are available? I'm aware of Tidal which I'll likely switch to shortly unless someone can suggest something better.

I miss Rdio :(

Am I the only one who downloads mp3s from youtube directly? My needs are rather simple: listen music from my mp3 player/phone (so I don't need to sync anything).

I have a “liked songs” playlist that collects all the songs I’ve put a heart on, are you talking about a different feature I’m not aware of?

cons: plenty of music I listen to, isn’t on there :/

pros: better quality. doesn’t matter for airpods, but that’s bluetooth issue