Comparing music streaming platforms like Apple Music, Spotify and YouTube Music isn’t unusual behaviour, trust me! All music plays a huge part in our lives, we need to have a good, reliable and user-friendly platform that will help us live our lives with a soundtrack constantly playing in the background.
Today, a battle of the Music Streaming Platforms shall take place. They will be tested based on 5 categories and at the end, and you will have to vote for your favourite streaming platform after reading all the facts.
Here’s a categorised comparison of each of these music streaming platforms:
Category #1: Music Library
When it comes to music library, the winner is of course, YouTube Music. Even though Apple Music and Spotify Premium both have an extensive catalog, YouTube Music has a ton of mashups, fan-created covers, live videos, remixes, and more. All of these are labelled as unofficial music, which aren’t really available on the other two platforms.
Category #2: Music Recommendations and Discovery
If you like getting music recommendations and also discovering new artists and new music, people everywhere will tell you that Spotify and Apple Music will definitely help you do that. In reality, all three music streaming platforms offer recommendations and discovery. The question is, who has the best recommendations?
The answer: Apple Music. It is the quickest among the three to identify your music taste and replicate it in their suggestions for you. Did you know that most if their music are curated by teams of editors worldwide who are responsible for curating music, not AIs. Their recommendations like homegrown artists, highlight new artists and even the New Music Daily playlist are all done by this team.
Category #3: App Experience
When it comes to this category, I won’t even have to explain why (but I will) Spotify is the winner. Spotify has a very smooth app experience, making it very user-friendly. They must have hired a really good cognitive scientist to test out the app, because it gives users such a seamless experience.
I’m not going to say that Apple Music’s app doesn’t give me a smooth experience but, there have been times when it glitched a little. However, I am going to give them credit because, there have been many updates as of recently making the app a little smoother la.
We need to give YouTube Music a little time, it is still a baby so maybe we will see some improvement in the app experience department soon.
Category #4: Audio Quality
Honestly, this section only matters if you have some kind of high-tech earphones or listening devices. Spotify can stream up to 320 kbps via Spotify Premium's "Extreme" audio quality option, while both Apple Music and YouTube Music only go up to 256 kbps. You won’t notice the difference that much though, so does it really matter?
Category #5: Pricing
Both Spotify and YouTube Music have a free version however, you will be interrupted by ads every now and then which can be pretty annoying when you’re in the middle of a workout. If you want to pick the better free version, you and I both know it’s Spotify because YouTube Music will immediately stop playing when you lock your screen.
Apple Music, on the other hand, does not offer a free version.
Here are the prices for the single user and family plans for each platform:
# Spotify Premium: Single User RM 15.90 | Family RM 23.80
# Apple Music: Single User RM 14.90 | Family RM 22.90
# YouTube Music: Single User RM 14.90 | Family RM 22.90
Now, after reading all the facts, we want to hear what you have to say!
