> I like Apple Music because it integrates well with the Apple line.

Is there a need to integrate with anything? All I need is to play music. Spotify is as integrated into macOS and iOS as Apple Music.

> More importantly though it is one of the highest paying per stream to artists [1]. Streaming needs to be much more lucrative for artists and consumer choice helps that.

Too bad they are shooting themselves in the foot by neglecting user experience.

> Is there a need to integrate with anything?

I do like a more open/api platform and wish Apple was, but Spotify probably won't be for long. Tracking my plays takes more work with everything to closed.

Apple misses some of the obscure stuff but I will always side with the higher payer to artists. I also like just being able to buy albums I like and support artists.

That higher royalty isn’t because of altruism. It’s probably a factor of licensing volume.

Comments like this one are a real puzzler to me. Why does it matter that the higher royalty is not out of altruism? It’s money! Money doesn’t care. More money for artists is good. You can’t buy a cheeseburger with altruism.

I guess I’m just not sure what sort of “gotcha” this is supposed to be. The beauty of incentive alignment is that you don’t have to waste your time trying to discern nebulous motivations of large groups of people.

> Comments like this one are a real puzzler to me. Why does it matter that the higher royalty is not out of altruism? It’s money! Money doesn’t care. More money for artists is good. You can’t buy a cheeseburger with altruism.

All the money that streaming services pay out goes to copyright holders. Guess who the copyright holders are. If you say "artists", think again. For the absolute vast majority of music it's the Big Four/Three: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry#Consolidation

So, when the likes of Spotify pay 60-70% of their revenue to the record labels, and the artists get peanuts... Spotify (and Tidal, and Apple Music, and...) get blamed. Now this is a real puzzler.

But the artist does get more peanuts if I stream on a service that spends more on royalties per play, yes?

If they just sold it, then no? They might get more for their next sale, though I imagine the count of streams is more influential for that than the revenue per stream

> If they just sold it, then no?

Please explain.

> though I imagine the count of streams is more influential for that than the revenue per stream

Whether I listen on Apple or Spotify, their count of streams increases by the same amount.

Until the Big Four renegotiate the agreement, yes.

Because if royalties are function of licensing volume, it makes no difference who you choose. If more people ditched Spotify for Apple Music, they’d start getting more favorable rates with record labels.

If you really wanted to help artists, it would make the most sense to use whichever service is cheapest and then donate the difference to artists. But, personally I’d just go with whoever provides the best user experience, which is none of them, so I basically haven’t listened to music aside from occasional YouTube chill beats for years.

This is unfathomably sadistic.

Yeah, don’t go work for FAANG’s because that increased salary is probably just a ploy to increase profits.

The integration with HomePod is very nice, I can just go ”Hey Siri, play Tom Waits” or whatever. Maybe that works with Spotify, I dunno, but the integration with Apple Music is obviously seamless, it just works.

I have to disagree with this. I have endless issues switching the playback between my iPhone and HomePod, sometimes I’ll have to quit the app just to get the right device to play music. When I’m playing the song on my iPhone with playback on the HomePod it sometimes ‘forgets’ the HomePod is the playback device and using the controls on the iPhone to pause the song etc do nothing forcing me to use Siri to stop playback on the HomePod. Not to mention how useless Siri is when asking to play certain things (e.g. trying to play an album that has a song with the same name on it). I generally like the HomePod but the integration (and Siri in general) are massively lacking.

I’ve had similar issues with HomePod when it comes to other apps (e.g. playing podcasts from Overcast using AirPlay), but the Apple Music integration has never been a problem, that has always just worked. Siri sometimes gets confused about what you’re asking (as with all these systems), but it’s less than I expected and at an acceptible rate for me.

Have you tried saying “play album _____”?

This is what I always do and it works fine

Actually it does work with Spotify, and pretty well in my experience. I guess Apple are wary of antitrust rules.

Yep, until a couple years ago you had to say “Hey Siri, play Tom Waits on Spotify,” otherwise it would always try Apple Music even if you didn’t have a subscription or the app wasn’t installed. But they changed it - probably for antitrust reasons, like you said - and now it’s pretty seamless.

Nope. Then you're streaming FROM your iPhone.

As far as i know there is no native Spotify for HomePod : https://www.macrumors.com/2021/11/22/spotify-users-impatient...

In my experience, nothing Homepod and Siri related “just works”. I do not even bother to ask it what date it is anymore.

Music is included in Apple One Premier along with TV, News, Fitness, Arcade, and 2TB iCloud Drive. All these things integrate well within the Apple ecosystem and family sharing. One Premier is honestly one of the best value subscriptions in tech today.

However, I do think it’s anti-competitive. Spotify, for example, has absolutely no possible way to get my business until and unless my entire family were to ditch Apple.

I don’t like the Music UI but I’ve come to understand how to use it and it no longer bothers me.

It is highly useful having you AppleTV playing music and this to show up on your iPhone lock screen

Yet KDE connect is able to do this without requiring the use of a KDE music player, just through the use of standard MPRIS interface

My phone does that on the lock screen too, but it works it out from sampling sound, so it "integrates" with everything from someone's AppleTV to an Alexa.

The "comparing royalty payouts" talking point needs to die.

Read this article to learn how $ payouts per stream are determined: https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2022/02/music-streaming-real...

It's all pro-rated. 52% of Apple Music revenues go to labels, by contract; Spotify is around the same. Royalties are just revenues divided by # of streams (simplification).

Spotify's free users give lower royalty rates per stream, and Premium users give higher ones. If Spotify users like rap more than AM users, then rap will have higher rates on Spotify than Apple Music, since a larger proportion of revenue will go to the same amount of rap songs.

If Apple Music is more painful to use than Spotify, or has worse discoverability, then people won't listen to as many songs (or won't leave it on for 8h as background noise) as with Spotify, and royalties will be higher per stream than Spotify. The higher royalties don't make up for the lower # of streams since discoverability benefits small artists.

Are you saying the table is wrong? I don't see that in your response. If the table is right, then artists are making less money per stream on Spotify. An artist might make more in absolute terms if there are more total streams on Spotify, but the artists are still being devalued and they would do better if the rates were higher. Personally, I want to use a service that values and pays artists well. ("Well" is a relative term here...)

My point is that Apple Music payouts are an identical percentage of their revenues to Spotify's; that means that any campaign to make people switch to AM will just mechanically make AM payouts decrease, and Spotify payouts increase until they converge.

Right now, Apple pays more per stream either because they may have more users in richer countries (Indian users don't pay $10/month), users who listen to less music, maybe older users (fewer students on student plans) and because they have no free tier.

So: the "AM has higher royalty payouts" is objectively a false Apple marketing point, because it's zero-sum. It's a pure accounting gimmick. Royalty payouts are pro-rata; there's no such thing as "Spotify's chosen royalty payout". For Spotify to get as high as Apple's, they'd need to make discoverability terrible (fewer hours listened per month = fewer streams = higher payouts per stream), get rid of their free tier, etc. They can't just "decide to increase payouts" because that's 52% of revenues, same as Apple Music, by contract.

lol this magnitude of royalty does not meaningfully broadly move artists into gaining a livable wage. let's expect more please. what a neoliberal idea to support specific choice of streaming platform purchase as a moral decision

What do you think would be a fair amount to pay per stream?

since you're asking me, I think artists should be able to make a living wage whether or not they're popular

Tidal is pretty great and worth a shot. Their recommendations are about as good as Spotify and they don’t try to shove podcasts into your ears.

Tidal has a long history of shady practices and failing to pay artists royalties. It reached a point where they were investigated by Norway for data fraud and faced class action lawsuits from labels and artists.

> The latest music streaming royalty rates are as follows.

This has very little to do with the service, and as everything to do with the Big Four (now Three) [1] that control basically all of music.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry#Consolidation

So if you don't like Apple Music just use another service but listen to more music?

Ha! Thanks for this idea. When I was on Spotify I already was listening to more music anyway, because Spotify just has more music on it period. I switched to Apple Music (family reasons), but half of what I used to listen to on Spotify isn't found on Apple Music. Apple has more money than Spotify, so why do all these problems persist for years and years?