For well over a decade, the music industry has been trying to figure out the Internet and they have failed more often than they have succeeded. Google play music kosten music sales and the rise of free sources like YouTube and Pandora have left a once proud industry in a state of perpetual anarchy. The happy medium for now seems to be music streaming. It brings money back into music and gives people quick, unlimited access to the songs they enjoy. For right now, the juggernauts in on-demand music streaming are Apple Music, Spotify, and Google Play Music. Please note that all three services are equally good at providing the latest popular music and most of the popular music from the last six decades or so. On top of that, users can upload 50,000 of their own songs to Google Play Music which will then be added to their library for streaming, which is a great way to carry around your personal collection without taking up space on your device. Any music google play music kosten purchase on Google Play Music will also be added google play music kosten your collection. Each account can have up to 10 authorized devices and you can de-authorize up to four devices per year. In May 2018, Google announced yet another music streaming service. Google has confirmed that YouTube Music will replaceand added that YouTube Music will eventually include all of the features that are a part of Google Play Music, including a way for users to upload songs. Read More: Spotify Spotify was first launched back in 2008 and currently advertises more than 35 million songs in their catalog. As of early 2016, they also support video content, as well as podcasts. As of 2018, the service had 75 million paying customers and a total of 170 million users. Spotify revamped their family plans in mid 2016 and now they are on par with Google Play Music and Apple Music. Spotify also supports a 50% discount for students. Each account can have up to three authorized devices and the service automatically deletes authorized devices as you add more. Apple Music Apple Music began life as Beats Music but was officially launched in its current form in 2015 and their catalog includes over 40 million songs. On top of that, users can upload up to 100,000 songs to iCloud to be streamed back to them, which is very similar to Google Play Music. Any music you have purchased in iTunes is also available for immediate streaming. Currently, Apple music has 40 million subscribers. Currently, Apple Music has no free version and is the only one of the three to not have this, but new users can try out the service for free for three months before paying. Compatibility In terms of compatibility, all three of these services are available on most mobile and computer devices. However, we found that Apple Music had the worst mobile compatibility out of the three. Spotify and Google Play Music have web players which gives them additional compatibility on virtually anything with a web browser. That gives Spotify and Google Play Music an equal advantage over Apple Music in this category. Winner for best content and compatibility When you add it up, Spotify has the best free service but its content is otherwise par for the course these days. Apple Music had a strong showing, but like Spotify its only really big feature is its music. Given that YouTube Red is directly linked into Google Play Music and provides an untold amount of additional, ad-free content, the service that has the highest compatibility and the most additional content is Google Play Music, hands down. In our examination of Apple Music vs Spotify vs Google Play Music, we took a look at all three services to see what it was like to actually use their applications. Please note, that all of the design testing was done with full, paid accounts for all three services. Each page does pretty much what the title says it does. You can see the latest popular music with Top Charts, the newest content with New Releases, check out your library, browse stations, and Listen Now acts as both a landing page as well as a discovery page. It could be argued that Google Play Music is occasionally too flashy The My Library page is broken up into a lot of sections. This is both good and bad because it gives you a ton of ways to view your content but the layout requires a lot more work on the part of the user to access all of it. In this instance, it could be argued that Google Play Music is a little too flashy and a simpler, more streamlined approach would have been appreciated. The browse stations tab is much the same way where users must perform a ton of swiping to get to various categories. When you play music, the music player is constantly accessible either in the notification drop down or as a truncated box at the bottom of any given page. The player itself is pretty standard with prominently featured album art along with a thumbs up and down buttons and the standard control buttons at the bottom. Right above that is the repeat button, the shuffle button, and another Chromecast button. You can hit the music note icon at the top right to return to the playlist or song list to change the track. To the right of that is the three dot menu where you can access additional options including adding the song to your playlist. You can click the thumbnail in the top left corner to close the player and return to the app to look around. Spotify Spotify uses a lot of the same basic principles as Google Play Music where the majority of your navigation is going to take place by opening the left slide-out menu and google play music kosten picking your category. However, Spotify takes a much less flamboyant approach and it is decidedly more simple to move around the application. It also employs Material Design but seems to do in more measured doses. The app opens up to your library page which, in my humble opinion, is the correct place to open the application. From there you can use the slide-out menu to go to Search, Browse, Radio, and then back to Your Library. Much like Google Play Music, the title of each category more or less explains what each one does. Spotify also has Material Design, but in more measured doses. You can also access podcasts and video content from here by clicking on the Shows option. This is a really smart google play music kosten to do this as it creates an easy, all-in-one hub for finding new content and users know where to go if they want to find something new. The Radio section is where the curated playlists are kept in case you want to try those. The music player acts almost identically to Google Play Music. You can access it anytime in the notification drop down or by the truncated box at the bottom of the application. We will note that the notification player has a plus symbol to easily add the current song to your library without entering the app which we thought was nice. These sections do exactly what their titles suggest that they do. Apple Music looks good, but not Material Design good. Each section is well defined and the content is prominently and simply displayed. This creates a disjointed and sloppy feeling in the application as your finger will have to google play music kosten frequent between your back button and the navigation button in the top left corner. Apple tries to be different by putting the three dot menu in the bottom right instead of the top right which is unusual. google play music kosten Winner for design With Apple Music vs Spotify vs Google Play Music, all three applications had surprisingly good showings in the design department and this was a very close one because all three of them do so many things in such a similar way. Google Play Music definitely had the best looking interface, but its penchant for being flashy often requires extra taps and swipes by the user and we felt that it got in the way of the user experience. Apple Music has a surprisingly robust interface, but its outdated design google play music kosten occasionally sloppy execution gave it a disjointed feel. It really felt like Spotify struck that perfect balance where it was simple and streamlined when it needed to be, but flashy, modern, and fun when the occasion required without getting in the way of the user experience. Apple Music vs Spotify vs Google Play Music — Playlists and curation All three services offer the ability to create playlists along with google play music kosten, pre-made playlists for you to listen to. This is a huge feature because it kind of dictates how we listen to music on the service and curated playlists are a large draw thanks to the popularity of radio streaming apps like iHeartRadio and Pandora. Google Play Music As expected, Google Play Music does allow you to create your own playlists. Playlist creation is rather simple. You find the songs you want, add them to playlists, and then you can play back the various playlists. You can play them in random order or sequentially and modifying playlists is generally easy. Back in 2014, Google purchased Songza with the expressed intent of improving their curated playlists, and it worked. Not only can you find the usual playlists based on genre, but Google Play Music also has playlists for various moods and activities. We thought that was spectacular and all of the options offer up hundreds of playlists for various situations and emotions. You can also start a playlist based on a song, genre, or artist that you like just like Pandora. Spotify Spotify follows a lot of the same lines as Google Play Music. You can create your own playlists by surfing for songs and adding them at your leisure. You can also share your playlists with friends and then import playlists that other people have made and Spotify arguably does this better than anyone else. The service also has a pretty decent curated playlist selection. They adhere to basic genre selection and each genre has a variety of playlists based in that genre. Apple Music To put it bluntly, Apple Music has the best self-made playlists out of the whole bunch. When you add a song to a playlist on Apple Music, the service automatically adds that song to your library as well. This is in comparison to competitors where you must add songs to playlists and your library separately. This means you can build a library and playlists simultaneously which saves you a lot of time and effort in the long haul. Curated playlists, on the other hand, could use some work. Apple Music uses the genre system which has even fewer options than Spotify right now. It has live music, live radio hosts, interviews, and brings a certain human feel to an otherwise robotic experience. Even so, we really liked the idea of Beats One and it is a feature that neither competitor can replicate. Winner for playlists and curation This was another very close call in our look at Apple Music vs Spotify vs Google Play Music. Google Play Music wins because it simply pounds the competition into submissions with the vast amount of playlists you can interact with on both the Play Music app and on YouTube. Apple Music had the best user-made playlists and Beats One offered a fun, unique experience that neither competitor could replicate but also google play music kosten enough aside from that to still remain well rounded. Apple Music vs Spotify vs Google Play Music — Additional Features Most people will be picking up one of these three services to listen to music. However, that is not all that they can do. Each of these services offer unique features aside from just music streaming. Google Play Music Google Play Music has a strong game when it comes to additional features. The one that is worth talking about the most is YouTube Red. YouTube Red gives you additional features in the YouTube Music app, offers ad-free YouTube videos on both computer and the application, and then it also allows you to listen to YouTube videos with the screen off. YouTube is, of course, the single biggest video streaming site on this entire planet. This adds an insurmountable amount of video content that ranges from tech to sports, funny videos, music videos, video podcasts, and even those goofy, five second quote clips from that show you like. On top of that, the Google Play Music application also acts as a local music player and can see the music you have stored on your device. This successfully bridges the gap between locally stored music and streaming with more fluidity than the competition. It also includes support for Android Wear, Android Auto, and, hands down, the best support for Chromecast. Chromecast support also extends to all of the YouTube content. Spotify Spotify has only a few additional features. It has superior music controls and you can do things like crossfade and gapless playback. The app also contains better notification support and control so you can get notified when new artists or albums his Spotify. It also has direct support with Facebook which gives it a better social media presence than either competitor. The podcast and video content is a bit scarce with how new it is, but we expect the library google play music kosten grow over time. For now, you can find stuff like clips of Jimmy Fallon and Epic Rap Battles of History along with podcasts such as The Nerdist and various podcasts by HowStuffWorks. The one additional feature that we can touch on is the Connect feature. It gives your typical user the ability to follow various Apple profiles and artists and engage with them. You can choose who to follow and as you read status updates, you can drop a heart if you like and even comment if you want to. That said, Google Play Music had the best extra features thanks to its inclusion YouTube Red which adds so much extra content to the table. Google Play Music Google Play Music does a great job of providing a good amount of content for the price. The real catalyst for success in this category is, once again, YouTube Red. Even with the transition to YouTube Music in the wings, current Google Play Music subscribers will still access YouTube Premium, which will have all of the features included in YouTube Red. Spotify Spotify offers quite a bit as well. You get the 40 million songs, all of the playlists, and you get the podcasts and the video content all ad-free. Spotify has native desktop applications for Windows and Mac along with a web player that can be accessed on pretty much any operating system much like Google Play Music. On the plus side, it has a great free option and college students can get the service for 50% off. Apple Music also gives you free cloud storage for up to 100,000 songs similar to Google Play so you can bring your own library. Unfortunately, for now, the service is new and only contains music. Winner for the best bang for your buck This one was ridiculously close in this Apple Music vs Spotify vs Google Play Music battle. Google Play Music wins, again, because of YouTube Red. Google Play Music subscribers will still be able to access all of the features of YouTube Red when it changes over to YouTube Music in 2019. Apple Music vs Spotify vs Google Play Music — Who wins. Winner: Google Play Music Second place: Spotify Third place: Apple Music This ended up being a much more difficult comparison than was originally envisioned. All of these applications hit the all of the most important points when it comes to design, content, google play music kosten playlists with only minor differences and nitpicks between them. They all have additional features that add value. However, at the end of the day, Google Play Music has that proverbial streaming cheat code with YouTube Red which adds so much content. Spotify had a strong all around showing. Apple Music came in third, but not by the wide margin that I originally envisioned. The interface is functional and even adheres to many of the Android design guidelines. It is a shame that it offers no free services like the other two, otherwise it may have been higher on this list. Some people are going to love the virtually limitless content that Play Music offers while others will prefer the more streamlined Spotify experience. Others still will see the allure of Apple Music as a viable option. Which service do you use or would you use?.
