I consider myself to be a pretty big music listener — I like to have something playing at my “day job” while I’m sorting paperwork and running reports, as well as whenever I’m writing blog posts like this, or sorting files. In a lot of ways, it’s never been a better time to be a fan of music. In addition to the variety of sites online where you can buy music, streaming services are incredibly prevalent. Big technology companies, such as Apple, Amazon, & Google all have dedicated streaming services, while companies like Spotify and Tidal focus specifically on music streaming as their business model.
Now there have been a lot of debates over whether companies like Apple and Google are anticompetitive in the way they promote their music services over others, and I’m not here to make a call on that. That’s for the courts to decide. All I will say, in response to Spotify’s claim that Apple Music has hurt them, is that no one I know that wants to install Spotify has found Apple Music to be a barrier to that.
But I digress.
Saying that I’ll never use Spotify is a pretty bold claim — one unlike any that I like to make. Obviously things change, but the reason I say I’ll never use Spotify is because there’s one feature I value that Apple Music has that makes the service more valuable to me than any feature Spotify could offer.
What I Like About Spotify
It’s been a while since I’ve used the service, but I have kept abreast of what the company is doing. Honestly, there’s a lot to like about Spotify. From my understanding, their music discovery functionality is some of the best. While Apple Music does have some mixes that I enjoy, I do find that I need other apps from time to time to help me surface new music that I may not have otherwise found.
Likewise, there’s one feature that Spotify has that I’ve been screaming from the rooftops for Apple to add to their streaming service: music handoff. I won’t get into all the specifics here as I have previously written of my desires for this, but it’s one feature that Spotify adds that I think would add a lot of value to the service for me. I don’t actually have any experience using this one personally, but from listening to Federico Viticci talk about it on AppStories, my understanding is that Spotify creates an online listening session that can be used to switch between devices. Apple, conversely, only offers a form of handoff from the iPhone to a HomePod by holding the phone near the speaker — but there’s no way to take a listening session from my MacBook to my iPhone, or vice versa. I do have reasons to want to do this.
The One Apple Music Feature That Keeps Me Locked In
As for the reason I’ll never use Spotify — it has nothing to do with the fact that they’re just now working on getting out a proper Apple Watch app, or even the limited system integration vs Apple Music. The feature that Spotify lacks that keeps me from using their service is…
iCLOUD MUSIC LIBRARY.
Here’s the thing: I was born in late 1992, so I remember the time before streaming. I remember listening to music on cassette and CDs. I remember having a CD player on the counter near the living room to listen to music with my mother and getting my first portable CD player. I even remember ripping my CDs and loading them on my earliest MP3 players, before the iPod entered my life. I remember going to FYE and Best Buy and walking the shelves looking for music to buy. I’m shy of 30 years old, but in a lot of ways, this makes me old.
The year is 2021 — I guarantee you that there are young people listening to music on Spotify that find the concept of buying music archaic and may have never spent a dollar on actual music tracks a day in their lives. For someone like me who does have a a CD collection, though, I needed to find a way to bring that into the cloud with me. It started with iTunes Match before eventually moving to iCloud Music Library.
Don’t get me wrong, streaming is great and it’s how I consume most of my music now, but streaming for any medium becomes a lot less great the second they don’t have what you’re looking for. A good example for me is the album The Rocky Horror Punk Rock Show, a late ’90s collection of Rocky Horror punk rock covers. I don’t believe the album is currently available to stream anywhere, I know it wasn’t a few years ago. That led me to go online and hunt out a copy. As soon as the disc arrived, I ripped it to an external drive and uploaded a copy to my iCloud Music Library. I can now listen to the album whenever I want.
That’s a feature that I place a lot of value on, as it means I can fill in the gaps that streaming services inevitably have. With Spotify, if an album is missing, there’s no way for me to just upload that track. That means that in order to have The Rocky Horror Punk Rock Show with me everywhere I go, I would either have to keep the files on a music player locally, or fall back to iCloud Music Library anyway. Sure, a lot of people in my life do use Spotify over other streaming offerings; yes, music discovery on Spotify is well beyond what is offered on almost any other service; yes, a form of music handoff is a thing. But even with all those benefits, they don’t add more value to me than only having to use one app to manage my entire music library.
So will I really never use Spotify? Probably. If they did add the ability to upload your own tracks to the cloud, I may have to seriously reconsider that.
In the meantime, I’m curious: what music streaming service is your service of choice? Let’s talk about it down in the comments below!
Want to keep up on everything I’m creating around the web? Click here to sign up for my weekly newsletter That Jersey Gamer Weekly where I share content from both my blogs, miscellaneous writings that don’t make it into posts, and some of my favorite tweets I’ve sent in the last week.
Dan Stransky 