Apple Music vs. Spotify: Which Is Best?

Apple tends to create new product categories a lot—smartphones and tablets, for example, arguably didn't exist until Apple made them worthwhile.

So when Apple is an also-ran, it bides its time, and comes out swinging. There are few fights like an Apple fight. When it enters a new market, the gloves come off, and the services one thought unbeatable are frequently bloodied. Remember the Rio MP3 player? Neither did anyone else once the iPod came to town.

That's what we're all expecting with the debut today of Apple Music. We'll have a full review later, but for now we can only go on the announced specs for the service, and try to quantify it alongside the competition. In this case, the current champion in most people's eyes remains Spotify (though there are other alternatives). Below is the quick guide to the differences and similarities.


Founded	Jan. 2014 as Beats Music; acquired by Apple in May 2014 for $3B; relaunched June 2015.	October 2008, Stolkholm
Cost	Free radio (Beats 1 and other stations) or $9.99 per month	Free ad-supported streaming and radio or $9.99 per month ($4.99 for students)
Family plan	$14.99 per month for six family members (shared via iCloud Family Sharing)	$4.98 (50 percent off) for each additional family member account
Trial with full functionality	3 months free	3 months for $0.99
Requires new mobile app	Nope—it's in the Music app when you update to iOS 8.4	Yes
How many countries	100 at launch	58 + many territories
iTunes integration	Full integration of iTunes songs and playlists, including songs on iTunes Match ($24.99 per year) and songs in iCloud	Use third-party tools to convert iTunes playlists to Spotify; desktop Spotify can pull in local files
Number of users	TBD; Beats Music only had 111,000	75 million+ users, 20 million+ subscribers
Number of music tracks Recommended by Our Editors First Listen: Audible's New Harry Potter Audiobook Is a Nostalgia Trip With a Modern Twist	30 million+	30 million+
Internet radio playlist curation	Humans (plus live Beats 1 Internet radio)	Algorithms
Number of skips for free	TBD, but limited	Five per hour
Sound Quality (free)	256Kbps	96Kbps
Sound Quality (Premium)	256Kbps	160Kbps or 320Kbps
Platforms	Mac, iOS, Windows at launch: Apple TV and Android to come	Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, Roku, TiVo, Samsung Smart TVs, Linux, PlayStation, the Web, and more
Podcasts	No (Apple has a separate app for that)	Yes
Videos	Music videos, clips uploaded by artists	Yes
Taylor Swift	Yes	No

Also check out 19 Spotify Tricks That Will Make You a Streaming Samurai.

About Our Expert

Eric Griffith

Senior Editor, Features

My Experience

I've been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally since 1992, more than half of that time with PCMag. I arrived at the end of the print era of PC Magazine as a senior writer. I served for a time as managing editor of business coverage before settling back into the features team for the last decade and a half. I write features on all tech topics, plus I handle several special projects, including the Readers' Choice and Business Choice surveys and yearly coverage of the Best ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs, Best Products of the Year, and Best Brands (plus the Best Brands for Tech Support, Longevity, and Reliability).

I started in tech publishing right out of college, writing and editing stories about hardware and development tools. I migrated to software and hardware coverage for families, and I spent several years exclusively writing about the then-burgeoning technology called Wi-Fi. I was on the founding staff of several magazines, including Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine. All of which are now defunct, and it's not my fault. I have freelanced for publications as diverse as Sony Style, Playboy.com, and Flux. I got my degree at Ithaca College in, of all things, television/radio. But I minored in writing so I'd have a future.

In my long-lost free time, I wrote some novels, a couple of which are not just on my hard drive: BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale," according to Publishers' Weekly) and a YA book called KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. Go get them on Kindle.

I work from my home in Ithaca, NY, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.

The Technology I Use

My first computer was a Laser 128, an Apple II-compatible clone with an integrated keyboard, matched with an eye-straining monochrome green monitor. I used it to type papers in college for other people for money...until I discovered the Mac SE in the college computer room. That changed my life. My first cellphone was a Samsung Uproar—the silver one with the built-in MP3 player from the Napster days (the pre-iPod era).

I use an iPhone 15 Pro hourly and an iPad Air infrequently (but I'm always in the market for a cheap Android tablet). I have a PlayStation 5 just to play Spider-Man, and several Windows machines, including a work-issued Lenovo ThinkPad. I talk to Alexa and Siri all day long. I do the majority of my computing on a 15-inch LG Gram laptop attached to a Thunderbolt hub to run a multi-monitor setup—I overdid it on the power needed to simply work from home.

I'm most at home in Microsoft Word after decades of writing there. More and more, I turn to services like Google Docs, using tools like Grammarly. I use Google's Chrome browser due to an addiction to several extensions I think I can't live without, but probably could. I use Excel extensively on data-intensive stories, but for chart creation, we've switched over entirely to using Infogram for interactive features that are hard to find elsewhere. I do a lot of graphics work for my stories, but limit myself to the free and amazing Paint.NET software to edit images.

I'm a firm evangelist for using the cloud for backup and syncing of files; I'm primarily using Dropbox, which has never failed me, but I also have redundant setups on Microsoft OneDrive, plus extra picture backups on Amazon Photos and iCloud. Why take chances? For entertainment, mine is a streaming-only household—my kid has never seen network TV and barely been exposed to commercials, thanks to Roku and Amazon Music. The house is peppered with smart speakers from Amazon for instant gratification and control of smart home devices like multiple Wyze cameras and Nest Protect smoke detectors. I've got accounts on all the major social networks, to my horror. I have a robot vacuum for each floor of the house. I want a 3D printer, but not sure what I'd use it for.

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