57: My first Spotify bill

A little less than a month ago, I was in the honeymoon period after signing up for Spotify for the very first time. I was impressed with Spotify Connect and the integration with the Amazon Echo. But having been burned pretty badly by Apple Music, I wasn't ready to fully commit to the streaming lifestyle. I set a reminder a couple days before my trial was set to expire called "cancel Spotify?"

This past week the reminder fired. My phone buzzed, I pulled it out of my pocket, and I immediately swiped the notification and tapped "Mark as completed". There's no way I'm canceling Spotify right now, for a few reasons.

Discovery

I'm far from the first person to say it, but Discover Weekly is the killer feature that sets Spotify above Apple Music and all other comers. I've put a handful of new-to-me albums into heavy rotation as a result. I've found Good Graeff, a Spotify minnow with around 10,000 worldwide listeners, who are quickly becoming my current favorite band.


It's hard to put a price tag on that experience, but $2 per week seems very conservative. Some months that covers the entire Premium subscription fee; other months, $2 are leftover to go towards access to nearly every other song on the planet. Apple Music always felt like the full $10 went just to catalogue access, even though they're putting in more human curation effort.

Ease of use

I am bafflingly lost every time I try to use Music on iOS or iTunes. When my Apple Music trial expired, I more or less stopped listening to music at work because my library was so inaccessible (I had relied on iTunes Match before). On Spotify, I still have some organizing to do: I feel like I don't yet have a library there. But on the other hand, I don't need one; search is adequate. Even in the Mac app, which is little more than a web view wrapper and doesn't even have a ⌘F keyboard shortcut, searching is faster and more effective than in iTunes. (Better than iTunes, an app that at its introduction touted type-ahead search! It is not hyperbole to say that iTunes has regressed.)

Ubiquity

I used to roll my eyes at Spotify links and embeds across Twitter and the web because I thought I couldn't listen to them. But Spotify is the lingua franca of music sharing, and it is accessible with just a free account. An Apple Music link is a dead end to someone who's not a paid subscriber. Apple needs to find a compromise between having a premium-only service and being so exclusive that they drive away business. I should know, because I've taken mine elsewhere. I've paid my first Spotify bill and it won't be my last.