Yep, playlists are one of the reasons I use Spotify. The fact that you can search other playlists that other users made on Spotify and easily get curated lists relating to every genre makes the entire experience very nice. It's nice to just type in a genre or mood and get hundreds of playlists that fit the bill.

For example, I like some noir movies and the jazz within that genre. There isn't a specific genre that most music playing devices would realize but Spotify has lots of user made playlists that has the type of music I want. Compared to Google's lackluster results

https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/srst/noir+jazz/EAY

I don't really think that iTunes or Google Play has the same thing, I may be wrong though.

Are there any specific artists that you've been able to find on Spotify but not on GPM? I haven't run into this problem yet (except one time when Mick Gordon maybe forgot to renew or something his Wolfestein soundtrack? It was fixed within a week though)

I am friends with several small music publishing groups (I hesitate to call them record labels) and every artist is excited to get their album up on Spotify...and that's it.

Many of the self publishing activity that Soundcloud was/is famous for has moved over to Spotify.

New releases from smaller acts seem to be Spotify FIRST right now.

Can you give an example of the larger library?

Yeah I like the social feed. Wish you could get to it on mobile though.

GPM has a lack of some international artists.

This Taiwanese artist is on Spotify but not Google Play Music.

https://open.spotify.com/artist/2JBUyLiFvpFPWdZGqIGYLD?si=uq...

https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/sr/crowd+lu

Nothing except youtube, but that's just cheating.

Same with this one.

https://open.spotify.com/artist/0tNjyz75Px29Yuf1sjs25G

https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/sr/cosmos+people

Google Play Music has Jay-Z, as far as my research shows. (unfortunately I can't check as I have Spotify due to their network affect roping me in through a family plan) Is it really fair to say Spotify has a bigger library outright?

Spotify claims to have 35m songs and GPM 40m. Not that that means much, either. The killer feature GPM has over Spotify is that you can upload your own tracks to fill the gaps wherever their library is lacking.

Spotify has Jay-Z as well.[0] I would say it's hard to really quantify which library has the larger selection as most of the differences would be completely obscure music that no one listens to. However, I haven't seen any artist on GPM that isn't on Spotify while the opposite can't be said.

Spotify has the ability to upload music as well, however that is contingent on you having premium.[1]

[0] https://open.spotify.com/artist/3nFkdlSjzX9mRTtwJOzDYB?si=j1...

[1]https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Windows/Can-you-upl...

I'm not going to dig around for metrics on this, but my intuition is that Google covers a larger base of "established" musicians whereas Spotify seems to be dominating new releases from smaller artists.

Google Music, Pandora, iTunes, are seemingly there to cover bases. The momentum appears to be towards releasing your music on Spotify first for your friends to listen to.

Larger library? They all use the same base library afaik.

Spotify "Over 35M" [1]

Google Music 40M [2]

Apple Music 45M [3]

[1]https://press.spotify.com/us/about/ [2]https://play.google.com/music/listen#/sulp [3]https://www.apple.com/apple-music/

I thought this as well. I used both for a while and never found instances where spotify had a lead.

>"Larger library"

Uhm no they are all licensing the same content from the same 4 entities.