Over the weekend, Dave Mark of The Loop, was asking, on Twitter, about what people think of Spotify. He did an experiment, comparing it to Apple Music, asking So why don’t you just use Spotify?.
Dave’s article is insightful. He starts off with my biggest gripe about Spotify:
Spotify’s interface is complex and confusing…
But continues to say that it’s “no more so than Apple Music.” My biggest complaint about Spotify is one that’s really easy to fix: their white-on-black interface is very hard to read. It may be cool among young people with good eyes, but it’s a FU to anyone whose eyesight isn’t perfect. I find it hard to navigate, hard to read, and uninviting, and this both on the desktop and on mobile.
Dave says:
Spotify allows you to follow curated, active playlists. Apple Music has a similar feature, described here.
Spotify does this much better, and Apple will need to emulate them. What you can do on Spotify that you can’t do on Apple Music is follow playlists that anyone creates. Sure, you can follow mine if I share them with you, but you can’t search for playlists or users and add their playlists to your library (or, in Spotify, the hard-to-use sidebar). This gives Spotify a big advantage, especially if you’re interested in obscure music. There are lots of users who share their eclectic tastes.
Dave points out other areas where Apple comes out ahead, such as the price of a family plan. But he concludes:
Bottom line, Apple Music has a distinct home field advantage. If Apple can find a way to unify the iOS and Mac universes, sand off the rough edges from both interfaces […], this is their ball game to lose.
Yep. If.