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Comment by andrewmcwatters | Hacker News Reader

The only things that keep me from moving over to Apple's plan are being able to import my playlists and liked songs (thousands!) from Spotify, and Discover Weekly and Billboard Hot 100-esque type playlists.

Does Apple have equivalents of those features? Discover Weekly is incredible.

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Spotify is way ahead of Apple Music on everything to do with discovery. I tried to switch to Apple Music (mostly for the Homepod Mini support) and really disliked the apple music app.

I had the same experience. I went into it and really wanted to buy into Apple Music but after a couple of painful months I went back to Spotify.

It's interesting, I had the opposite experience. Years ago used Spotify and found that Discover Weekly rarely had anything I'd actually want to listen to, whereas with Apple Music's New Music Mix I'm adding the songs it digs up fairly frequently. Might have to do with preferred genres.

Some leaks in the past suggest Discover Weekly simply searches through other users' liked songs and if you like Artist A and they like Artist A and B, and you haven't checked out B yet, there's a better chance you'll like Artist B over C that neither of you have heard before.

They're not leaks, they literally had talks and blog posts about it. https://www.slideshare.net/MrChrisJohnson/from-idea-to-execu...

I didn't have great luck with Discover Weekly either, but I also suspect that there was a familiarity bias in play -- Apple Music was the first service I paid for, so I stuck with it and found lots of things that I really liked. When I tried Spotify a few months ago for a while, it just didn't feel like it was materially better and I found the UI a little confusing (see: familiarity bias), so there didn't seem to be any reason to switch.

I have a suspicion that if I'd actually paid for Spotify and stuck with it for a few years, though, the reverse would be true. My gut feeling is that these two services just aren't different enough in practice to make switching between them worth it for most users, unless they want a feature in the larger ecosystem (e.g., AirPlay 2 or Spotify Connect).

I've used both on and off, for a couple years each. Ultimately what made me come back to Music was simplicity and ecosystem integration. Big fan of the social features in Spotify though, like the Wrapped "year in review" feature.

Transferring songs and playlist is actually very easy (unless you are listening to very niche stuff). Songshift (no affiliation) worked very well for my needs and moved most of my playlists and songs over. Not sure about discover weekly though

I second Songshift.

I switched awhile ago, and have now gotten the bundle as well. I bought an app on iOS called SongShift that has handled migrating my playlists very well. It’ll even keep them in sync both ways.

My musical preferences did not lend themselves well to Spotify’s discovery, I don’t think, and Apples has been a similar experience. Both have been ok, but neither stellar.

Apple has a few personalized playlists that get updated weekly, I really enjoy them. Seems like in general, Spotify fans think Spotify is superior, AM fans think it's superior. I've tried to use Spotify recently for a couple's subscription and I find the UX worse, but maybe it's just different more than anything.

I started on Apple music and found the app ok but not great and found the webui to be completely broken. Like you would click play and it would play a different song in the list.

Switched to spotify and it has all worked better and the recommendations are better.

It seems they built Apple Music in a browser out of the Previews of the iTunes Store, which would explain why it is so terrible.

I've used both extensively. The libraries are fairly similar or maybe even the same these days but Spotify is miles ahead on recommendations and automatically generated playlists, radio, things of that nature. Apple was better for mixing your local library in with theirs (you can kinda do this on Spotify but it is extremely clunky). Otherwise they're about the same.

I've converted at least 5 people from AM to Spotify once they realized things like the social features like collaborative playlists, artists created playlists, following your friends to see their playlists and what they're listening to and they all tend to say the discovery/radio is much better although I think Pandoras blows it away. The UX is constantly in flux and it's different between OS's (only the desktop has 90% of the social features) and they keep nixing good features (mostly social, I guess due to EU regulations) which is frustrating.

Last year they updated it and removed the Android widget completely - we absolutely revolted blasting them with 1 star reviews, etc. They timed it with the launch of their India service so I have this theory that they knew they'd lose a bit of customers (they had no idea how many Android use widgets apparently) and negative reviews would come in but replace them with revenue/reviews from India which knocked their stars right back up.

Literally same day. I don't like the company because of things like that but it's still IMO the best music service. I'm using Tidal as well for its hifi/masters now.

I've used soundiiz.com for importing likes & playlists (though from different source and target services). Works well enough.

Apple Music has New Music Mixes and Continuous Playing.

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