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Comment by tuxracer | Hacker News Reader

Unpopular music service to acquire even less popular music service. With those forces combined they will be unstoppable! /s

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In one year they've managed to acquire half the number of paid subscribers Spotify has - and with a pretty buggy product. That's pretty impressive.

I suspect that is largely because the product is bundled with the iOS. I wonder how it doesn't on Android, where people have to go out of their way to install it.

Does it even matter? The iOS device base is so large that Apple can get more paid customers than Spotify on their own devices alone.

Isn't Apple Music already the #2 most popular streaming music service behind Spotify? I'd hardly call 15 million paid subscribers unpopular.

How many of those 15 million are people who forgot to turn off auto-renew on their free trial?

Maybe 3. Who doesn't notice $10 a month on their card? People with little spare money would feel it, and people with lots of spare money usually get that way by paying attention to their finances.

You're right, consumers who buy the newest iPhone each year are real penny pinchers. \s

Apple Music has been out for a year today. After the initial three-month free trial, I would think that most people would notice $10 missing from their bank accounts every month.

I once paid $80/mo for a year for a server I forgot I had.

It happens.

Or at a certain point 10 dollars is nothing and the time alone to figure out apples weird settings isn't even worth it. I still pay for a few things that I never use but just don't feel like figuring out how to cancel.

I'd be happy to unsubscribe you from those services, in exchange for 50% of what I'll save you monthly.

I think "most people" is giving "most people" too much credit!

Mark, that's a legitimate question, but shouldn't you also ask how many Spotify customers forgot to turn off auto-renew? After all, they are also quickly acquiring customers.

In my opinion, a lot of users of streaming media services are neither enthusiastic customers nor entirely forgetful. Their opinions of the services they pay for aren't consistent from day to day, either.

It also is way better than Spotify for me. It's everything I wanted out of a music service.

Spotify was never going to have me as a subscriber but Apple Music was so much better (for me) that it was a no-brainer.

But then I always preferred Pandora over Spotify anyhow (different use cases I know, but still).

In what way is Apple Music better than Spotify? I've tried both and, other than catalog differences, I don't see one as really being better than the other.

I chose Apple Music for a couple reasons:

1. I can add music to my streaming library that is not on their service and that music isn't treated any differently than the stuff in their catalog from a UI standpoint.

2. It integrates better into the Apple ecosystem, which I've already tied myself too. For example, play music using Siri and Apple TV support.

Also, I'm not a fan of Spotify's UI.

1. With Spotify I can also add all the music I want from "local" sources, aka my computer. And later I can stream that music from my Android phone.

2. Spotify works great with Google Now and Chromecast.

Also, I'm not a fan of Apple Music's UI.

For a start: the UI.

I know Apple Music gets hate for it's UI but it's nirvana compared to the horrible, grating, death by 1000 papercuts UI that Spotify has.

So that contributes a LOT to my impression of Spotify.

I find their radio offerings better than Spotify, and the curated playlists to be of higher quality and better variation. The For You tab alone is better than a lot of what I found on Spotify.

The importing of my existing library and linking of it into the service with all sorts of metadata made for a seamless experience that I haven't found from any other service either.

Basically... it's just a little bit better (for me) in every possible way, while being nicer to use.

Does Apple have an equivalent of Discovery Weekly yet? That's become one of my favorite Spotify features.

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