Interesting article and thread, thanks MacRumors! I’ve also been bouncing back and forth between Spotify and AM over the years - tough decision and I fully agree that knowing if you’re a “music librarian” (AM feels like going to a record shop) or a “social listener” (Spotify feels like listening to radio) helps a lot! What if I would like to be both?
I decided to unsubscribe from AM recently because of some bugs/missing functions (duplicates/split of albums in my library, subpar and slow Mac app, abyssal web app…), but also for redundancy. I settled on Spotify (already having a Family Subscription), because listening to music is a great social activity : finding a lot of good public playlists (e.g., songs from a video game or a festival), making collaborative playlists/blends, sharing audio to any device (+ Spotify Connect which allows me to control music around my house from different devices - still baffled Apple doesn’t have this except the obsolete iTunes Remote)… Spotify is also good at recommendations but I have the feeling it keeps throwing you the same songs if you don’t dig deeper in the app.
Then I have my “personal” music collection which is work-in-progress and consists of CDs bought in stores or online (also secondhand!), that I rip to FLAC/ALAC and use Music.app to listen to it (also the iPhone 15 PM allows for high-speed transfers so it’s really easy to drop your whole collection like back in the days with the iPod). Feels good to own my collection and to listen more in “album mode”. It will also still be there should I stop paying for Spotify!
Just my 2 cents
I decided to unsubscribe from AM recently because of some bugs/missing functions (duplicates/split of albums in my library, subpar and slow Mac app, abyssal web app…), but also for redundancy. I settled on Spotify (already having a Family Subscription), because listening to music is a great social activity : finding a lot of good public playlists (e.g., songs from a video game or a festival), making collaborative playlists/blends, sharing audio to any device (+ Spotify Connect which allows me to control music around my house from different devices - still baffled Apple doesn’t have this except the obsolete iTunes Remote)… Spotify is also good at recommendations but I have the feeling it keeps throwing you the same songs if you don’t dig deeper in the app.
Then I have my “personal” music collection which is work-in-progress and consists of CDs bought in stores or online (also secondhand!), that I rip to FLAC/ALAC and use Music.app to listen to it (also the iPhone 15 PM allows for high-speed transfers so it’s really easy to drop your whole collection like back in the days with the iPod). Feels good to own my collection and to listen more in “album mode”. It will also still be there should I stop paying for Spotify!
Just my 2 cents