Recently I decided to try Spotify after several years of Apple Music (and other things). They were offering 3 months free to trial the Spotify service, and I took them up on it.

The first thing I noticed is that they put a lot more in your face than music. I was offered podcasts and audiobooks, and these recommendations kept showing up throughout the interface, getting in the way of finding music. Very irritating.

Everyone seems to be using Spotify. Almost all the links to music you get from people, including artists, is to Spotify. And yet, Spotify is apparently the service that pays artists the least.

But I've repeatedly heard that Spotify is the best at discovering music for you, and that turned out to be completely true after just a few hours! I was really impressed!

Also, Spotify keeps generating new playlists for you, with different ones showing up daily, with music it thinks you'll like. Apple Music has a discovery station that is personalized, and your own station that is personalized, and offers others to you based on artist mixtures, but this seemed next level at Spotify.

Unfortunately, after a few days, the Spotify magic wore off fast. It seems that even though Spotify was generating all these new playlists for me daily, it was always the same songs in each, just moved around. And it wasn't even subtle about it. It felt like the Spotify magic algorithm got its first whiff of me, and then decided that was absolutely me now, and etched it in stone, never to move again.

I waited a few weeks for this to change, manually selecting different types of music, which did result in different playlists that kept playing the same things, but the experience was completely flat compared to the curated and automated playlists in Apple Music which felt far more "alive".

It didn't take long for me to decide against Spotify, particularly considering its incessant push of audiobooks and podcast in my face, and their treatment of artists. It had been about a month into my free 3-month trial, and when I went to cancel it, Spotify warned me that if I cancel now, it will end my free trial immediately, rather than letting me continue for the full period. 😄

No problem, Spotify, you can just cancel it right now then, rather than hoping I forget to cancel by the end of the trial.

It was a good exploration, and made me appreciate even more the subtle elegance of Apple Music, which focuses on music, and on trying to make the experience rich rather than calculated. Also, and this is no small thing, the sound quality of Apple Music was much better to my ears.

So, I guess it's bye, bye, Spotify, to you too...