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Comment by schmorptron | Hacker News Reader

Wow, I've been using Apple Music on trial to see how it's different from spotify and with this news + Spotify now selling pseudo-ads in the forms of playlist and recommendation algorithm placements for less artist royalties I'll stay with Apple for sure.

One thing that really differentiates it is that the curated playlists seem a lot more cared for than with Spotify. I've found so many of the pre-made playlists that I enjoy, and with Spotify you just can't really do that since you never know what's really there because the curator liked it and what's there because the label paid for it. Fun fact: The Apple Music Android app is suprisingly decent!

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> One thing that really differentiates it is that the curated playlists seem a lot more cared for than with Spotify.

Completely agree. This was Beats Music’s raison d’etre, and Apple Not only maintained the playlist curation team/process/whatever, but have made it bigger and better.

My favorite playlists get regularly updated - seemingly by the same person, or someone with extremely similar tastes in music, and I love it.

This has been my reason to switch to. Apple Music feels more "orderly". They often have detailed essays from album releases and I love that you can filter by label - something that is pretty handy if you like electronic underground music.

>Spotify now selling pseudo-ads in the forms of playlist and recommendation algorithm placements for less artist royalties

Hard to take artists demands to be paid better seriously when they keep agreeing to things like this.

Honestly they are their own worst enemy at times.

Perhaps the ones making these demands aren't the ones that have these agreements.

Main thing I miss from Spotify is the discover weekly playlist.

I started using Apple Music because Spotify’s attempts to ruin podcasts by making them exclusive to their platform irritated me.

Discover weekly is a really great thing though and Apple Music’s stuff isn’t as good.

I think Apple Music's "New Music Mix" is their version of Discover Weekly, it's under the Listen Now tab

The New Music Mix only releases one playlist a week. I believe Discover Weekly releases five playlists a week, each with their own moods. I much prefer Spotify's approach.

However I do find that both services largely recommend the same music to me. They just have different mechanisms of surfacing it.

Discover Weekly is once a week: on Mondays. You're thinking of Daily Mixes, of which there are 6 that update throughout the week, one playlist per day.

To go along with Discover Weekly there's also a Release Radar playlist that updates every Friday with that week's new releases from your artists.

Spotify is so deeply engrained into my weekly schedule that I really look forward to the Discover Weekly and Release Radar playlists bookending my work weeks.

Yeah - it sucks in comparison. Not at all similar to anything in my library. It might as well be random.

That's fair, same for me. Discover weekly (and to an extent release radar) were some of the best features on Spotify for sure, they had a way higher chance of really hitting good than they have any right to.

Yeah that's why I could never return to Spotify after using apple music for about a year now.

Spotify seems to be pushing out playlist after playlist without giving much afterthought. The quality is just not there , some seem to be auto-generated and a lot of playlist are duplicate/similar to each other.

Apple's playlist are regularly manually curated and you can know the theme just by glancing through their succinct titles.

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