Music, being a main source of entertainment for high school students, has increased significantly within recent years. With constant releases of new music and wireless headphones comes more students listening to music throughout the school day. This increasingly popular pastime introduces the debate of the best way to listen to music. Spotify and Apple Music are the two most used streaming services within WJ but which is better?
Price:
With any membership comes a wide variety of prices. Spotify offers a free option, allowing users to listen to music with many restrictions including frequent ads in between songs and a limited number of times you can skip a song. Many users get tired of these restrictions but still enjoy the platform itself, which results in the listener paying for a membership.
Apple Music comes out on top as the cheaper option but doesn’t offer a free membership option. For an individual account, both Spotify and Apple Music offer one month of free listening before Spotify charges $11.99 per month and Apple Music charges $10.99.
App accessibility:
Some iPhone users choose to stay loyal to the Apple brand by sticking with the built-in sound software on their mobile device. Apple Music being an automatic part of the IOS operating system allows for instant access for any iPhone user. Android users also have the option of downloading the app from the Google Play Store. In 2021, Apple Music released its spatial audio feature which maps the sound quality to the listener’s headspace.
“Apple Music has better sound quality and shows better requests for music you might enjoy depending on what you last listened to,” junior Ethan Gitelson said.
App Features:
Both Spotify and Apple Music offer their own unique features for their listeners. For Spotify accounts, friends can follow each other’s accounts and see people’s playlists. Apple Music has a radio section in their app for listeners but requires a completely different app for podcasts, unlike Spotify. Spotify offers a very popular Spotify Wrapped for every listener at the end of each year to see their top artists and songs from that past year. Although Apple Music also has a yearly music recap, Spotify Wrapped is more popular and overall comes out on top with app features.
“It just has everything in it, I started using Spotify and grew up with it,” junior Yael Ben-Eliyahu said. “Spotify premium is so worth it.”
Aesthetic:
Apple Music’s interface is consistent with Apple’s overall simplistic aesthetic while Spotify’s design philosophy focuses more on music discovery and browsing options reliant on past song choices through an algorithm. For a lot of users, Spotify’s simplicity makes it easier to navigate through over Apple Music and the general layout makes it more appealing.
Although both platforms are tied between categories, Spotify and Apple Music both have their own distinguishing features. Spotify overall takes the lead with the fact that users are able to listen to songs for free, in addition to still being able to receive a Spotify Wrapped even if they aren’t paying for a membership.
“I’d rather just pay for Spotify, it includes more [features],” sophomore Victoria Irani said
Based on a WJ student survey, 86% of people prefer to use Spotify rather than Apple Music.
