By Deedee El bego
Why do we love Spotify?
There’s so many streaming services for music like Apple music, YouTube and SoundCloud. Yet no matter what Spotify has the highest downloads on the App Store and consistently leads the music streaming market. This could be for a number of reasons and RollingStone recently compared the top music streaming services to find out. “Spotify recently reported it has 626 million monthly active users, which makes it the most popular music streaming service by several orders of magnitude. One of the reasons it’s so appealing is that the company offers a totally free tier, which is a good deal if you’ve never tried a music streaming service before,” (Anderson, 2024).
Of course everybody loves things that are free, but many of the active users do in fact have a subscription for $11.99/month. Luckily that isn’t the only subscription option, Spotify does also offer a couple of deals. Students can get access to a student premium which is only $5.99/month. Families can also pitch in together for the family premium plan which is $19.99/month. Most users can agree that the main reason they purchased premium is because of the disruptive ads that continuously play if using the app’s free tier. While users using the app for free get access to the same 50 million songs, podcasts, and playlists, the ads are really what push users to purchase a plan.
When comparing Spotify to its runner up, Apple Music, one can see the obvious differences. For example, Apple Music doesn’t offer a free tier, instead they offer users a free trial. The issue with this is that it’s not as encouraging since eventually you will have to pay in order to keep using the app. Taking a look at prices, Apple music is relatively similar. They have a $5.99/month student plan, and their family plan is cheaper than Spotify’s since it’s only $16.99/month. Their individual subscription is also a dollar cheaper at $10.99/month. Despite this though, many users that own apple products are still using Spotify instead.
Spotify has always been available for a variety of users whether they own Apple, Android, or PC. Comparatively Apple Music has a “not-so-seamless integration for Android or PC users”, (Anderson, 2024). Furthermore, some argue the Hi-res and spatial audio included is better than Spotify. This may be true, but it hasn’t convinced enough users to switch over.
