For the past couple of years, the debate of which music streaming service is better has taken over social media. For some background information, Spotify has been up and running since 2006, while Apple Music started in 2015. These two streaming services have been the two most popular services for a while now, and are the cause of a lot of debate. To preface, I am a bit biased because I am an Apple Music user, but my point that Apple Music receives too much criticism is still valid.

Based off of layout alone, I believe that Apple Music is the better service. With Apple Music, it gives more of a minimalistic design, while Spotify is far too cluttered for me. It’s extremely easy to navigate, and the criticism that Spotify is better for discovering artists just isn’t valid. Apple Music has led me to many small artists, some that have blown up in the time that I’ve found them, and some that are still more on the unknown side. Since I don’t regularly use Spotify, I can’t say that one is better than the other, but I can attest to the fact that Apple Music is very useful for finding smaller artists.

One common critique about Apple Music is that it is a lot harder to upload things to it like you can on Spotify. While this is true, the process that Apple Music has you go through protects people from uploading things that are stolen from other artists. For example, if you looked up any artist’s name and then unreleased, you would find tons of podcasts on Spotify that are actually just unreleased songs that a random person has uploaded to Spotify. This is definitely better for the user, but it’s a major drawback for the artist that made the song.

Both Apple Music and Spotify create playlists for you based on the music you listen to, which can ease the stress of making a playlist. I’ve seen a lot of people who use Spotify claim that the playlists that Apple Music curates are bad, but I think they’re great. This point will stay up to debate because you have to actively use one of the platforms for the playlists to accurately represent the music you like.

Both have pros and cons, but if you don’t use Apple Music you do not deserve to hate it for no valid reason. At the end of the day, both are music streaming services, but think about how they feel. Streaming services have feelings too.

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By Abby Tredway, Staff Writer

Featured photo by LOGAN WEAVER on Unsplash