Acoustic Avenues: students decide, Apple Music or Spotify?
In this weekly column, senior Emily Thomas provides her take on a new albums, concerts, and artists.
October 18, 2021
This week I want to veer away from album reviews and dive into the platforms that give me the opportunity to find so much new music. Apple Music and Spotify. Having used both platforms to find and listen to music, the move to Spotify was a great choice because it provides a much more personalized selection. Discovering new artists on Spotify has been so much easier than finding them on Apple Music.
This isn’t just about me, however. I launched a poll on Wingspan asking respondents what their favorite streaming service for music is. The options they had were Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon Music, Soundcloud, and Pandora. Overall, 19 people responded with 15 voting for Spotify and 4 voting for Apple Music. These results were interesting because both platforms balance out when it comes to pros and cons.
Apple Music, though less personalized, is a much easier platform to use. Its interface is way less complicated than Spotify’s and it is way easier to add music to your library and find it in there too. Another thing I like about Apple Music is that you can download music off of wifi whereas Spotify needs wifi to download tracks or playlists.
Despite it’s annoying cons, Spotify is still a very good and popular streaming service. I like it because it makes personalized playlists and because it suggests new music and artists that you will like based on your history. I find it to be way more accurate than Apple Music’s, frankly lazy, attempt at doing the same.
There is another side to the story, however. Spotify might be better when it comes to suggesting music and creating playlists, but it has not gone without controversy.
Spotify is the largest music streaming service in the world, bigger than Apple Music, and yet they pay their artists less per stream than Apple Music does. Now, neither service pays their artists directly, instead they pay the label who owns the rights to the music of that artist.
Once that money is in the labels’ hands they can distribute it among the masses and do with it what they please (it’s important to note that Apple Music pays the same headline rate to independent artists even if their music is not owned by a label). The problem is that while Apple Music is paying all of their artists/labels a penny per stream, Spotify is only paying them almost a third of a penny per stream. This means that Artists who are only releasing their music on Spotify are making less money per stream than if they were just releasing it on Apple Music.
This whole debacle has been the cause of some controversy in the music industry when it comes to paying artists fairly for their art. Since the pandemic started and tours have gone down greatly, there is no revenue to be generated from that. It is because of this that labels are pushing for Spotify to pay the same as Apple Music pays their artists in order to help make up for what was lost to the pandemic. This is not the only reason of course, it is ultimately a matter of showing artists appreciation for putting time and effort into creating music for our enjoyment.
Looking at it from a musical or design perspective, both platforms have their pros and cons. In that respect I prefer Spotify, but when it comes down to which of the two is paying their artists a fair amount per stream, Apple Music takes the crown.
It’s a struggle when you are a big follower of the music industry to decide between these two platforms because you know that they both provide, ultimately, the same service, so when you know about Spotify’s dealings it makes you feel a little responsible for contributing to it. The thing to remember here is that, though we can’t make Spotify pay artists a fair amount of money per stream, we can petition for it and bring the problem to light. If enough pressure is put on Spotify to change their policy then maybe we can have fair payment of all artists.
