Apple Music and Spotify are the two most popular music streaming platforms among consumers. Between Spotify and Apple Music, what platform do people use the most and why? My co-writer and I both use a different platform and became curious as to which is better. To answer our question we wanted to see what our peers think. We will look at the history of both platforms and their stats, followed by our data.
Spotify music was launched in 2008, it is currently the most popular audio streaming service in the world. The app offers a free plan as well as 4 different “Premium” plans: An Individual plan, which is $11.99 a month for just one person, a college student plan which includes Hulu for just $5.99 a month, Duo which is $16.99 and family which is $19.99 for up to 6 people. This plan allows parents to control content for their kids. Premium plans allow you to have ad-free music, the ability to download music for offline access, play any songs in any order, make a playlist with friends that several people can add to so you can listen together, and you can cancel at any time.
Apple Music launched in June of 2015. Apple Music offers a 3 month free trial before you must pay $10.99 a month for an individual account. They also offer a student plan for $5.99 which includes Apple TV, there is also a family plan for $16.99. With the plan, you have access to 100 million songs, the option to request songs and ad-free music. The biggest downside being that they do not offer a free plan.
After collecting data, we learned that Spotify is a more popular platform for music in our school. We asked 21 faculty members which platform they use and why. 12 people said Spotify, two said Apple Music, two said they use both, and five said another platform. Most people that use Spotify said that it was convenient, it’s what they’ve always used, or preferred its features. One of the features people really loved was their podcasts. A response from one of our interviewees, Mr. J, states that “There’s one thing that separates the animal species from men, and that is using Spotify music. Apple Music users are subhuman.” An interesting response from Mr. J, but it shows us how passionate he is about Spotify.
Through our research, we found that, overall, people rank Spotify as the preferred platform. Apple music offers cheaper plans, but doesn’t offer a free plan. Spotify is more expensive, but it is available for use without a plan. Among the few staff members we interviewed, we learned that Spotify is used a lot more than Apple Music. Spotify seems to have benefited from coming out before Apple Music, as everyone that got onto Spotify didn’t want to switch their music app after already having all their playlists set. Apple Music is also limited to Apple users, Spotify is more inclusive for everyone.
