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Comment by mcmullen | Hacker News Reader

Spotify is bundled with mobile phone contracts in the UK - my wife won't even try the Apple Music free trial because it's another UI she has to learn and Spotify is free with her contract. I think that sentence summarises my view of Apple's chances in the market: so long as they (Spotify and others) are slightly cheaper than Apple Music and are friendly with people like the big telcos, I don't see Apple Music adding much more than better branding and higher prices.

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Apple Music has a few things going for it.

1. It is integrated with the Music app. So you can have your existing and Apple Music in the same place. And of course it can be accessed via Siri, Apple Watch etc.

2. The UI is excellent compared to Spotify which is still dreadful after all this time.

3. Beats 1 definitely brings something new. Especially since they are so well connected in the music scene. And of course with Dr Dre being on board you are routinely seeing exclusives not just from him but other people or Iovine know e.g. Compton the Soundtrack.

>2. The UI is excellent compared to Spotify which is still dreadful after all this time.

This was the case in ios a couple years ago but not any longer. I'd argue the UI/UX is much better. It's so easy to queue something up I just swipe the song to the left and if I want to save the song, do left swipe. The only thing with Spotify is you can get buried in menus and have to keep clicking back.

Spotify need to work on an easier way to create and edit playlists - better search within the playlist and an easier UI would be a massive improvement.

Interesting that you mention the Music app in point (1). I understand the argument that having it all in one place and integrated throughout the OS is a benefit. But, I actually think the Music app is way too complicated for the average user. It took me a while to work out what was going on. I also disagree with your point (2) as I think Spotify is pretty simple to understand and use.

Well I am not so arrogant as to speak for users around the world. But they have signed up 11 million in a few weeks so clearly it isn't too much of an impediment.

Spotify is an easy app to use but it has inconsistencies all over the place. Especially when you are saving offline content and the interplay between starred, playlists, and songs/albums.

11 million free trials pushed through the first page of the App Store and Apple website. Time will tell.

Funny as I have the same problems with Apple music - it randomly deletes my songs and portions of playlists.

Apple really need to focus their apps (and they should start with iTunes first).

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