The apple music hype

So im guessing you're looking for an apple music customers opinion and not the opinion of an artist who has music on there.

Apple music is kind of like spotify except that it is something that works natively on your apple device (iphone, ipad, itunes) as a service that is enabled as part of the music app, whereas spotify is an app that can be downloaded on either apple or android or windows devices, or run in a browser. They both offer searching, playlists, channels, etc. Spotify has a better social aspect with facebook integration.

As a customer Ive found that for what it is, i'd say its cheap and worth the money for reasons that are different to spotify. The advantages of apple music are that it integrates with your itunes playlists, and can be used in your home apple ecosystem (airplay on apple tv/other devices over wifi). You can save the music on your phone offline, you cant properly rip the music (same with spotify). The disadvantages are that I found it buggy in that it didnt always save music to my playlists, and sometimes would not connect or play at all without restarting my phone. You might say that its to be expected because its a new service though.

Spotify has the advantage that its more cross platform and has a web site version of the client, and that it is less buggy. You can also use spotify without paying if you're happy with the annoying adverts that sometimes cause the client to break. I ended up going back to spotify after a bad experience with my iphone 6S plus breaking, and apple music not saving my playlists properly even when it worked, but i may try apple music again in the future.

True that!

I only use Apple Music for streaming. Trying to save songs for offline listening causes crazy mixups with my library (don't turn on iCloud Music Library if you value your album art or metadata), so I don't even bother. And yeah, it can be buggy. Their curated playlists are pretty nice tho. But honestly, I don't think it's a whole lot different from Spotify.

That said, I'd be curious to hear an artist's perspective. What is your opinion of Apple Music, when you have your own music on there? Any different from the other streaming services? I haven't uploaded anything to it, so I don't know.

Lots of artists (including some favorites like Geoff Barrow and David Lowery) are complaining so much about how they've been robbed by these joint ventures between these streaming services and their late record companies that it almost feels better to just use bandcamp.

I find it really funny that you have to pay 10 bucks a month to use a feature that's available for almost every other audio player.

Plus, you get Youtube Red for free with Google Play Music Unlimited. Combine those together and I think the value is much higher than any other streaming service. I actually watch Youtube a lot, regularly from channels I subscribe to and it's nice to be able to support them without having to see ads. Plus, GPMU lets you upload your own music for free, which I don't think any other streaming services allow.

I know this isn't supposed to be a "what streaming service is best" thread, but dismissing Youtube Red like that really doesn't make sense.