Hacker News Reader

Comment by gizmodo59 | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone give some insights on how it compares to Apple Music or Google Play Music.

With 9.99 you also get YouTube Red and the selection for play music seems to be huge when compared with Amazon Prime Music (At least enough for me). If I don't have a song in play, I can use YouTube app and it plays in background. This is important for regional songs as Spotify does not have a huge library for non English songs but YouTube has almost everything. I agree that the quality is not that great with YouTube, but that's something is not of a big deal for me. Does anyone feel like this?

What's your metrics to decide between Play, Apple and Spotify?

View on HN

Play Music's apps are very immature and half-baked feeling compared to the alternatives.

Apple is better in that regard, but its app distribution is massively limited compared to Spotify or even Google Play.

I agree. Spotify is very strong here in Europe and it's super convenient to follow friends who are better than finding cool songs than I am.

I was a free user for a long time and got the subscription last Christmas. You can tell they really spend time on UX. Clear examples of this are the running playlists that adapt to your speed. We can't really expect Google to match that, it's Spotify's core business after all.

I've heard that the quality of google play music is generally lower than apple/spotify (apple/spotify are matched, apple may be slightly higher). As for youtube, on mobile there are third-party apps that give all of the youtube red features for free (except exclusives).

Apple music requires a dedicated app for desktop playback (although spotify does too, if you want to play music offline) and doesn't work on linux (it may or may not work through wine).

I really like that Spotify has a Linux app.

... Since it's built on electron, though, it's basically the same as the web player. A chrome web app would do too, really.

But I guess it's a nod of appreciation.

There are also some nice single board computer based players based on this and that's nice.

The SBC players are either based on libspotify, which has been rotting ever since Spotify deprecated it some years ago, or librespot, which is reverse engineered. Both of these break quite frequently. I don't think Spotify care much at all about Linux but I'm sure the user numbers make that decision easy for them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com