Spotify vs. Apple Music

How good are music streaming services? I remember a time when I’d download all my music from YouTube using an MP3 convertor, and then either rename them or just live with the track being called 2453_BringMeToLife_Evanescence.MP3.

Look it wasn’t a perfect system, but it was better than downloading a virus from Limewire.

Now, almost any song you want to listen to is at your thumbs with Spotify or Apple Music (or one of the others like Tidal, Pandora or SoundCloud). When you know that you can listen to your favourite artists on any streaming platform, how do you decide on the best one?

In this guide we compare the important differences between Apple Music and Spotify to help you make the best choice.

• Cost
• Catalogue
• Compatibility
• Features
• How much do artists get paid?
• Market share

Spotify vs. Apple Music: Cost

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An individual subscription on Apple Music or Spotify will cost $11.99 per month, student subscriptions are both $5.99 per month, and after that things vary a bit.

Both platforms offer a few different subscription pricing tiers, but you’ll ultimately get the same thing regardless of which one you jump on. Students benefit from a discount, individuals pay a standard rate, and families of up to six people can get a Family account for $17.99 on Apple Music, or $18.99 on Spotify.

Lets take a look at how each platform breaks down it’s pricing structure.

Apple Music cost

Spotify cost

Apple Music with Apple One

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If you’re well into the Apple ecosystem, Apple One is another way to get your Apple Music fix at a discount. An individual subscription sets you back $19.95 per month gets you 50GB of iCloud storage, and access to Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, and Apple Music. Without the package you’d spend $24.95 to get everything.

Spotify vs. Apple Music: Catalogue

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Both Spotify and Apple music have catalogues of around 70 million tracks as per each platform's last figures. For Spotify this includes 2.2 million podcasts, but podcasts aren’t included in Apple’s music streaming service. Instead, podcasts are housed separately in Apple Podcasts which has around 2 million unique series available.

Since Taylor Swift stopped withholding her jams from Apple Music, there aren’t any major artists that aren’t housed on both platforms. We tried searching for lesser known artists and albums across both major platforms and were surprised to find that they both housed such classics as Silk Road: Journey of the Armenian Diaspora. However, the full collection of So Fresh albums was inexplicably missing from Apple Music.

Spotify vs. Apple Music: Compatibility

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The idea that Spotify would be compatible across multiple operating systems feels like a given, but with Apple it makes sense to question. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time Apple locked out other operating systems from its features *cough*iMessage*cough*.

Despite the namesake, Apple Music does indeed work on both iOS and Android operating systems but is not available through the Huawei App Gallery. This means that all Apple and Android devices can download and utilise the platform, but any Huawei device made after the P30 Pro will need to sideload Apple Music through the Amazon App Store.

Spotify is available on iOS and Android, but newer Huawei devices will need to sideload Spotify through Amazon as well.

Spotify vs. Apple Music: Features

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Baseline features are similar between the two platforms. With either Spotify or Apple Music you’ll have full access to the respective libraries, be able to make bespoke playlists to listen to and share, ability to download music to listen offline, and a collection of curated playlists. There are however, a few differences between these features no matter how similar they look on the surface.

On Apple Music you can download up to 100,000 songs to listen to offline while Spotify limits downloads to 10,000. Both offer curated playlists based on your listening habits, however they’re put together a little bit differently. Where with Spotify you’ll get five playlists released at different times throughout the week, Apple Music creates a bespoke Radio Station based on your listening that changes sporadically

Apple Music will still give suggestions of Editor’s Pick playlists, or different radio stations based on your music preferences but these are not put together in the same way Spotify’s Daily Mix, and Discover Weekly are. Family (and Duo) plans on Spotify also get a range of group playlists that consolidate every connected account’s music into a neat little package.

Both will give you some sort of summary of your musical journey throughout the year - these are dubbed Spotify Unwrapped, and Apple Music Replay. Each brings together data about what, who and how much you listen over the year and displays the information in a yearly round up.

You won’t be able to access podcasts on Apple Music, but you can download tracks directly to your Apple Watch to listen to on the go. On an iPhone or iPad, podcasts live in their own dedicated app. Spotify now has integrated podcasts, however. 

Spotify vs. Apple Music: How much do artists get paid?

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Even though how much artists get paid on each platform may not be a huge contributing factor in your decision making, it may shock and depress you to know the going rate per stream.

In April 2021 Apple music released some figures noting that it pays, on average $0.01 per stream. While a singular cent may not seem like much, Spotify on the other hand pays between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream. Meaning that Apple Music on average pays between double and triple what Spotify does.

Although these numbers should be taken with a grain of salt. First of all, these average numbers are based on a snapshot in time - if one month a service has more streams than it’s average price per stream will go down, and visa versa. Secondly, services don’t actually pay artists on a per stream basis. A service will take its cut based on a certain share of monthly revenue, then the agreed upon revenue share will be paid to labels and distributors before being funnelled through to artists, songwriters, and the rest of the team.

Even so, it has been reported by artists and publications that Apple Music, Tidal, and iHeartRadio have a more generous payment model than Spotify does.

Spotify vs. Apple Music: Market share

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We’re not saying that you should do what everyone else is doing, but sometimes popularity is a solid metric for performance. Of course, the majority of people could be wrong but there is a reason why most people land on the same choice.

As of the end of 2020 Spotify had 155 million active accounts. As for Apple, it’s hard to determine market share as The Orchid hasn’t released any figures since June 2019. At this point the platform had 60 million active accounts and was growing at a rate of about one million new users per month. If this cadence held up then we can estimate that Apple Music currently has around 82 million users.