“My wife and I have a mix of Amazon Echo and Google Home speakers in our house. The obvious choice for a music-streaming service seemed to be Spotify since it works on both platforms. Or at least it seemed that way until we ran into the baffling and user-hostile way Spotify handles home postal addresses,” Josh Centers writes for TidBITS. “(I should have guessed something like this would happen after Adam Engst ran into an incomprehensible track limit on his account—see “The 10,000 Track Limit: Why I Switched from Spotify to Apple Music,” 30 August 2017.)”
“You don’t have to give Spotify a home address unless you sign up for a family plan,” Centers writes. “Apparently, Spotify requires address verification to try to ensure that all family members are in the same household, so presumably, those addresses need to be entered identically… [But] there’s no way to see the address you entered. In fact, until recently, the only way to change the address associated with your account was to delete your account and create a new one. Now you merely have to cancel your subscription, wait for your account to revert to the free tier, and then re-subscribe.”
“I strongly suspect this is a scheme to make the music industry happy, but it’s user-hostile and does nothing to prevent users from sharing family plans across households,” Centers writes. “Apple must have better leverage with the record labels because location isn’t an issue for Apple Music. Plus, Apple Music now works with Alexa.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Not to mention that it really makes no sense to subscribe to Spotify when it has 40% fewer tracks than Apple Music for the exact same price. Apple Music boasts a catalog of 50 million songs; Spotify has just 30 million. If you’re still subscribing to Spotify, it’s past time for you to cancel it and upgrade to Apple Music. (See also: How to move your Spotify playlists to Apple Music.)
SEE ALSO:
Apple is the real winner in Spotify’s battle against paying songwriters more – April 9, 2019
Apple Music overtakes Spotify in paid U.S. subscribers – April 5, 2019
Apple will not appeal songwriter royalty increase, digital music competitors Spotify, Google, Pandora, and Amazon – March 7, 2019
In James Bond movies you have to be surreptitious to put a listening device in a home or office. Now everyone willingly does so. 🥺
Total rubbish! I had both for more than a year and I am a heavy user of both or was. But over time I started slowly at first using Spotify more than Apple Music. I was a huge fanboy of Apple Music except for the problems that constantly kept popping up with the software, and how it suddenly would stop playing music in the middle of a playlist, or it would lose it’s place in a playlist and skip 30 songs or so. I spent hours on the phone with Apple and even though we were able to duplicate the issues together they were never able to fix them or even acknowledge that it would be worked on at some point in an update. Plus when I posted a playlist for all my facebook groups I found the vast majority of the users in those groups were using Spotify not Apple Music. So slowly I moved over to Spotify. Spotify has a companion app called JQBX which is like having your own radio station and being the DJ. through JQBX I am able to test songs, listen to new music I had not found yet, and generally discuss the latest in the genre I am interested in with other music lovers like myself. Is Spotify perfect, no not in a long shot but it is as good as and in many cases better than Apple Music. There are still things I like better on Apple Music but for my use Spotify is better. The discover mode on Spotify flat out blows away Apple. On the other hand there is the issue of something being on Apple Music that is not on Spotify, but the funny thing about that is when it comes to new release music often times Spotify has something that Apple doesn’t. I find most of the stuff that Apple has and Spotify doesn’t is due to it being an older song, or because the artist has some sort of agreement with Apple. And in that case you also have to add Amazon into the mix because they have Garth. In the end it came down for me to the simple fact that more people I reach with my Facebook Group use Spotify and JQBX. I can recommend both and do I don’t think there is enough difference in either one to recommend one over the other. As for the 10,000 song limit, well Apple had that same limit for years back to when they did not stream music but did allow you to store your music on their servers. Frankly I used to be in that crowd but now with so much new music out there I rarely if ever keep a full album in a playlist. If I had to delete some music it is likely stuff I have not listened to in years. And for me keeping songs around that I have not listened to in five ten or more years is not exactly a deal breaker.
Big differentiator for me is “Spotify Connect”. This allows me to use any mobile device as a control for a digital streamer device, but for the music to stream directly to that device, so that the mobile device can then be used for other things. Apple Music – as far as I know – can only stream music to other devices via Bluetooth as far as I know, meaning that you can’t then use your mobile device for other things when playing music. Show stopper for me.