I really don't want to change this discussion into a "which is the best music streaming service" debate, but I am really curious, why haven't your considered Google Play Music? Interface? Songs count? Price?

I am subbed to GPM for a few years now. I did it first because Spotify was and still isn't available in my country, but I don't think I would switch if they become available tomorrow.

I used to use GPM and am now a Spotify customer. For starters, I was annoyed that Google removed some of its playlist interface around the activity-based radios. You'd click an activity and there would be several stations/playlists for different styles of music that were great for that general activity. Loved it. Now I can't find it anywhere.

Second is the interface in general. Spotify realizes that especially on mobile, you have limited screen real estate. I really dislike Google's choice to overly emphasize giant thumbnails of album art I'll never care about or recognize, at the expense of not providing a list view for all levels of the hierarchy. This also leads to situations where artist names are truncated beyond recognition because there's only a few characters space for them.

The GPM app on my Pixel XL also takes seemingly forever to load and play, podcasts often lose their place, etc. Spotify just works.

The album art bit I'll generally agree with, but for the activity bit... not to sound too harsh, but did you even try to find it after they did a minor redesign a while back?

Menu ("..." on left in web) > Browse stations > Activities

It's right there!

The change occurred ages ago so I might be forgetting details, but what I think was removed was a more curated way of matching stations with the activity, with descriptions for each. Now it is just a ton of radio stations that often seem unrelated, and no upfront description of what it is unless you click through. Just more giant thumbnails I don't need.

I was using Spotify 3 years ago but it was killing the battery life on my Nexus 4 so I switched to Google Play Music (chose it because of the upload feature).

I like the service but there is many things in the UI that I don't like:

- No desktop app

- Album listing is a mess: . It doesn't differentiate between singles and albums so the album list is sometimes very long for no reasons . You can't mentally filter them yourselves as the number of tracks and the album's length are not displayed for each "album" . It is somehow sorted by release year, but not entirely (you can't chose anyway). . On mobile the year is not even displayed so if you want to quickly see if an artist has a new album or simply listen to the more recent one, you can't really be sure of what is displayed.

- On mobile the search button is not always accessible, you have to navigate / "go back"

- Features disappearing: . You used to be able to filter new releases by genre. Now it's a general category of just popular artists. . Same for popular tracks and albums. For my tastes this entire feature is basically useless.

- Radios: the UI used to suggest auto-generated radios based on artists you listen to, it was my favorite feature that helped me discover many great artists and songs. Somehow it got moved and it took me a long time to find it again (it's now only a link on the artist page I guess ? I never think to do that)

- Bonus nitpick : the upload feature is great, sadly your music is not available to other people on the family plan

I've really enjoyed using https://www.googleplaymusicdesktopplayer.com/ for desktop. Its just an Electron App but it seems to add a few extra features that make it much nicer to use.

Thanks I'll check it out. I used Nuvola player on Ubuntu at work which is a bit the same concept. Mostly I want access to quick play/stop buttons ...

https://tiliado.eu/nuvolaplayer/

(sorry about the formatting, couldn't edit it due to the noprocrast setting)

hmmm honestly it is just a case of "I used spotify first". If spotify hadn't been my first choice I probably would have gravitated to GPM instead. At this point I don't want to sacrifice any more of my life to Google, so if I had to switch it would probably be to nothing.

disclaimer : I worked for a music streaming service for several years

I don't really like the Play Music UI (but I don't hate it either, the new parts are very nice, but the album pages could use a bit more love).

I dislike the spotify UI though (why is it THAT dark and depressive ?) and play music removes the ads from youtube (us user) and pays youtubers, so that's an easy choice.

Oh, the winning feature of Play Music for me is that I can add my own album, even if it does not belong to their catalog. It still shows with all it's metadata and cover as an album.

I've been a subscriber to Google Play Music for a few years, initially I think my choice rested on being able to upload from my personal library, which was more significant back in the days when there was much less parity in music service catalogs - this was circa no Beatles. Then they added the youtube tie in where you don't get youtube ads - very valuable. I agree with the general UI complaint, it isn't great. To add to the crit, the branding is weak - 'Spotify' is meaningful, 'Play' is not. Despite all that, I've decided $100/yr for music on demand and no youtube ads is a good deal for me.

I tried Spotify a couple years ago and the experience was terrible and I haven't been back. I don't recall exactly: there was tons of hype, I had to download and run an installer, then create an account and validate email, and then I could play a song, so I picked a song and got some audio ads and subsequent more ads and suggested songs that were not at all related to the song I picked. It wasn't just not good enough to get me to switch, the onboarding was repellent.

I probably won't be their customer but I'm happy to see them succeed for a variety of reasons: customers love it, they aren't FAMGA, and that slide deck on their organizational squads and tribes [1] was significant in my work life.

[1]: https://blog.crisp.se/2012/11/14/henrikkniberg/scaling-agile...

You listed the killer features of Google Music for me: no Youtube ads, auto-pay my favorite Youtubers, and upload my own albums.

Also the Youtube Music app.

I've found their catalog to be really complete, I've rarely not been able to find something specific I'm looking for.

Only advantage I'm hearing from Spotify music users is that the algorithmic selections sound really good. Meh, I put in about an hour a month of surfing different Play Music radio stations and recommendations. Works for me.

I don’t think it’s possible to really understand how great Spotify’s algorithm is until you’ve experienced it recommending a fantastic song, and you go check the artist out, notice they have less than ten thousand plays and have only released two songs

Idk how that’s even possible but it happens once a month for me

They use human curation for many of the pre-built playlists, but those humans are also assisted by some interesting algorithm work on the backend.

For instance, the Fresh Finds playlists - music that's good but very new or undiscovered - are made by curators who sift through songs and artists listened to each week by "tastemaker users". Spotify combs through their listener data and identifies users who have a habit of listening to music that later blows up and becomes much more popular. They tag those users anonymously and use their taste to inform the Fresh Finds playlists, which also feed the rest of the editorial department.

Really cool stuff.

https://news.spotify.com/us/2016/03/02/introducing-fresh-fin...

I read it's based on human curation - this is the clever part.

If you have songs in your playlist that someone else has in their playlist it'll find a song in that other playlist that you don't have. Offload the complexity of matching to humans already doing it.

Sounds kind of like pagerank for songs.

Yeah I could see that - if you think of being in a playlist like a citation.

> I dislike the spotify UI though (why is it THAT dark and depressive ?) and play music removes the ads from youtube (us user) and pays youtubers, so that's an easy choice.

I am also not a fan of Spotify's UI. I've tried in order, Spotify, GPM, and am now on AM. I may try Spotify again, since my first try was a few years ago and I didn't care for the UI and became annoyed after I built a playlist and half the songs disappeared one day (rights issue I guess).

GPM is a great deal because it also includes YouTube Red and YouTube music if that's your thing.

You can also get a deal on AM if you buy for the year for $99 and use an iTunes gift card that you can usually find for ~$80.

The AM UI is not the best, but since I'm on iOS, the integration is nice.

> why is it THAT dark and depressive ?

Different tastes. I love their green and black theme. it's focussed and clean.

I was an Apple music since launch(till a month back). But once I tried Spotify and the playlists, I switched instantly. While Apple Music is a competitor, it's not everywhere like Spotify is and their recommendations are horrible. In all time using them, I discovered 2 songs that I liked. With 4 weeks on Spotify, I'm already at 25!

I've switched to an Amazon ecosystem (dot, fireTv, etc) and Spotify just works seamlessly between them all. I love it.

I have to wonder how many users Spotify picked up when Apple blew the christmas HomePod release and Amazon flushed out Alexa-enabled devices at heavy discounts.

The echo dot was the best selling product on amazon over Christmas. Luckily for Apple, I don’t think a $30 device will lock someone into an ecosystem.

Man, I don't know. I'm moving away from iOS/Siri/HomeKit/HomePod/iCloud(ugh) instead of moving toward it.

It might not be a lock-in, but given my track time on a non-Apple ecosystem and the value I'm getting out of Spotify compared to Apple Music...I'm not going back any time soon.

And, yeah: all it took was a $30 device.

As an alternative opinion I used both Apple Music and Spotify. Apple Music’s recommendation has been amazing for me, and Spotifys terrible and I have fairly strange tastes in music (play dark-Berghein techno, but then like exploring as many genres from around the world as possible).

If Apple Music was supported in as many places as Spotify I would drop Spotify.