One byproduct? It seems that Google Play's CDN and DRM handling, not to mention caching, is way superior to Spotify. Whether I am on wifi, LTE, or getting in my car and therefore in between the two, hitting play on Google Play will always result in a song playing within two seconds.
On Spotify, it's more like 10 seconds. And it may not play at all. It may be stuck reauthing my account. It may be stuck in a stateless DRM hypoxia where every track is greyed out, although I am authenticated. It's impossible to predict.
I think Spotify built a really cool 2007-era P2P infrastructure. Then turned it off. And never tried to think beyond the state of the art since then.
(To be fair, Pandora is better than the others, but dependent on genre. It does really well with classical music. With lots of electronica/electronica related music -- very annoying.)
Rdio had some really creative curation features. The "What's Hot" feature, which was a current hits list of what your friends like and are listening to was really amazing.
Their auto-play radio feature (it would start playing similar music based on what you just finished listening to) was great.
And lastly their "adventurous" slider, which allowed the radio station song search to land somewhere in the spectrum of just songs in your collection to new stuff you didn't have but was in some way related to the current radio station being played....man.....this feature alone was worth the whole subscription in my opinion.
The Spotify equivalent of "For You" is where I'm having the most luck. Maybe I'll give Apple another go.
Funnily enough, it has recommended a lot of British Isles trad/folk to me, (and also Québécois, for some reason) most of which is OK but some of which is really interesting. It's found several long medieval ballads, which I would have thought was far too niche to recommend.
I can't think of anything that Apple Music is great for, which is not very Apple-like.
Obviously there's a lot of personal preference here. Add in that Google has a TON of info on me, way more than Spotify could ever have, and it's almost not a fair comparison. I should mention that I left Spotify because they have a 10,000-songs limit on how many songs you can save, even with a paid account, and that was absolutely absurd to me- IIRC, Google lets you actually upload more tracks than Spotify would let you save.
Made a comparison spreadsheet there: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ptV0sWO2tBT4c3G8aiB0...
Spotify is such a far superior service, it works exactly as you'd expect it to, it has a free tier and a paid tier, it's basically as good as it gets for a music streaming service.