Giving up on Spotify

Today, I’m taking the big step of migrating from Spotify to Apple Music. Music is a big part of daily lockdown life, so if I get this wrong, the family will be revolting. Let’s see how it goes. [blog.mindrocketnow.com]

We’ve had a premium account for 5 years now. I’ve loved the service from Spotify, and found its music recommendations to be uncannily good. At the time, it was streets ahead in terms of integrations. It was easy to find gadgets that natively integrated with Spotify, and really hard to find native integrations with Apple Music or Google Play.

Over time, most of our device manufacturers announced integrations with all the music services, so that advantage eroded. So when an offer for a free family plan for 4 months comes along, it’s time for a change to save some money. After that, it’s £15 per month, same as everywhere else, so whether we keep it or not will be down to how much we as a family like the service.

We’re an Apple family, so setting up the subscription to Apple Music was very smooth. Because I hadn’t used iTunes in a long while, I had to review and accept new terms and conditions. I actually read them this time, and learnt a few things, like:

• There’s an android app for Apple Music. Strange bedfellows.
• iTunes Match is included in the Apple Music subscription (yes, it still exists, though nobody cares).
• I’ve given blanket consent for Apple and bedfellows to use my “technical data” - and because it’s an undefined term, it could pretty much encompass anything. I wonder how GDPR feels about this? 
• There is a cancellation policy for digital goods as long as written instruction with their forms is given within 14 days.
• Children under the age of majority should be made to read the agreement with a parent to make sure they understand it - fun times!

After setting up the subscription, it’s time to set up the service with all our devices. In order from easy to hard:

• Apple hardware - so easy. Also, ooh now the Apple Watch app works

• Sonos - set new default music in settings

• Waze - change default to Apple Music in settings

• Alexa - download and link new skill, then set default music service in settings

• (Sadly defunct) Triby - no native support for Apple Music (unlike Spotify), but can play music from the iPhone via bluetooth, or use the Alexa integration to stream from 

• Xbox One - we used to stream background music in the native Spotify app, but there’s no native Apple equivalent. Could download a third party airplay receiver for $20, but we decided to just play using the Alexa speaker in the same room.

• Android hardware - as easy as downloading the new-found app, then signing in. Except the app hangs on my shiny thing.

Now it’s the hard task: migrate my playlists. My pro tip is to prune them first! Spotify puts all the liked albums into the liked songs playlist, so making the list bloated. Once that’s done, there are plenty of tools to help move them from one service to another. I was at my desktop, so I used https://www.tunemymusic.com/ and it was very easy. I had 7882 songs so it did take 10 min to process, and 398 songs were lost along the way. But once done, all my playlists were magically available everywhere. Authorisations are via API so no passwords are stored by the website. Just to be sure, you can revoke permissions from Spotify’s web site https://www.spotify.com/uk/account/apps/ (which is a bit flakey) and a setting within the Apple Music app. 

Obviously, there’s also an app for that called Songshift. It’s perhaps more convenient for individual songs as the app can be invoked from the long press contextual menu. Again, pro tip is to revoke permissions once the migration is done.

It’s done! The whole process took about an hour, including a trip for coffee, so really quite painless. First impressions are that the range of music appears to be equivalent, but not identical. Recommended playlists are good, presenting music that I’d never heard before but immediately liked. Beats 1 seems to be exclusively R&B so not very interesting to me. The Android app is really good, better laid out than the Spotify app.

There are some bugs in the Apple Music app which are surprising and annoying, and as a consequence of a higher reliance on connectivity. I can’t actually play any music in the detail page of the iOS app as it times out before fetching the song list. As a result, the detail page is just blank, so I have to long press from the album page. Phone reboot fixed this. The watch app has to try twice to connect to the phone (don’t think that’s due to Apple music). Spotify was a lot better at dealing with lower and flakier bandwidths.

However on reflection, the family agrees it looks like a keeper. Will let you know in 4 months time.