Spotify and Apple Music, Honestly Compared

I've tried both for at least six months each. They are dramatically more similar than the marketing suggests. The differences that exist are mostly about which company you'd rather give $12 a month. Below is the honest breakdown for anyone trying to decide.

What both have

Roughly 100 million songs each. Most music you can think of. Both have nearly every album by nearly every artist who has released something commercially in the last 70 years. The exceptions are tiny — a few holdouts (some Garth Brooks albums were Apple-only for a while, some Joanna Newsom albums weren't on Spotify) and a few regional artists. For 99% of what most readers want to hear, both services have it.

Daily personalized recommendations. Both services watch what you listen to and build playlists from what they learn. Both do this reasonably well. Spotify's recommendations are slightly more aggressive about introducing music you haven't heard before; Apple's are slightly more conservative.

Offline listening. Both let you download albums and playlists to your phone for listening without an internet connection. Useful on flights, in the car in rural areas, on the front porch when the Wi-Fi is acting up.

Apps for iPhone, Android, computers, smart speakers, cars. Both services run on essentially everything.

What's different

Spotify has more aggressive social features. You can see what your friends are listening to. You can share playlists. You can collaborate on a playlist with another user. If your grandchildren are on Spotify and you'd like to see what they're playing, the Friend Activity feature is there.

Apple Music is more tightly integrated with the iPhone. Asking Siri to play a song works seamlessly. The Music app comes pre-installed. If you have an Apple Watch, the music plays directly from the watch. Lyrics scroll in time with the song. These small integrations add up.

Audio quality. Apple Music includes lossless and spatial audio at no extra charge, which means the recordings are technically higher quality than Spotify's default. Most listeners can't tell the difference on phone speakers or budget earbuds. On a good pair of headphones it's audible.

Podcasts. Spotify has invested heavily in podcasts and many shows are exclusive to it. Apple has Apple Podcasts as a separate app. For a heavy podcast listener, Spotify's integration is more convenient. For someone who treats music and podcasts as separate things, the distinction barely matters.

The price

Both services charge essentially identical prices.

Individual plan: $11.99/month or so.

Family plan (up to six people): $17.99/month. Genuinely good value if multiple family members will use it. Covered in our family sharing piece.

Student plan: $5.99/month if you happen to be a student.

Both services occasionally offer multi-month discounts and trial periods. The pricing tracks each other within a dollar or two.

The question almost nobody asks

Should you pay for either of them?

$12 a month is $144 a year. Over a decade, $1,440. Over twenty years, $2,880. These are not negligible sums for a household on a fixed income.

The alternative, covered in our music piece, is free options that are genuinely good — YouTube, library music apps, local radio over TuneIn. For someone who listens to music casually rather than constantly, the free options often cover 80% of what they'd actually use a subscription for.

The cases where the subscription is genuinely worth it:

If you listen to music or podcasts for more than an hour a day. The $12 a month works out to about thirteen cents per hour at that listening rate, which is wildly inexpensive entertainment.

If you've gathered a specific collection of playlists you'd be sad to lose. Investing time in a service means you should also invest the dollars to keep it running.

If multiple people in your household want the service. The family plan at $18 splits across six people; the per-person cost is about $3.

If you have a smart speaker (Amazon Echo, Google Nest, Apple HomePod) and want to use it for music. These speakers need a subscription to play on-demand music.

For someone who occasionally wants to hear a specific song and otherwise enjoys the radio, the subscription is real money that may not be worth it.

The "switching" question

If you're currently on one and considering switching to the other: most of the work of switching is the playlists. There are free apps (Soundiiz, Tune My Music) that copy your playlists from one service to the other, but the transfer is never 100% — some songs don't exist on the other service, some get matched to the wrong version, some metadata gets lost.

For most people, the switching cost is enough that staying on whichever service you already use is easier than the migration is worth.

My actual situation

I'm on Spotify. My granddaughter is on Spotify. We send each other playlists. That's the entire reason I'm on Spotify rather than Apple Music. If she switched to Apple Music tomorrow, I'd probably switch too.

Most family decisions about which service to use come down to this kind of social factor rather than the features themselves. Pick the one your family uses, or pick neither and use the free options. The actual music is the same on both.

Written by Robert Sandoval. Last verified 19 June 2026.