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Comment by calewis | Hacker News Reader

I agree but wonder if this is a sign of music streaming becoming a utility? Do most users care about sophisticated discovery and recommendation engines? Or do they just want billboard 100 hits?

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I think that is exactly it. For a pretty casual music listener like myself, I don't find a whit of difference between Apple Music and Spotify. Not that I've made a deep study of it, but then I'm a casual user.

Given that I'm pretty much all in on Apple otherwise, Apple Music seems like the natural choice to me.

I find apple music's recommendations better than Spotify's.

I still find Pandora to have the best recommendation engine in that it actually finds songs I like.

I've actually found Apple Music and Spotify to have around the same quality recommendations. Both have a Discover Weekly feature, both will let you create "stations" from a song or artist. Neither are great or innovative in any way but they sort of get the job done. The recommendations are miles ahead of YouTube but that's not saying much.

What about Amazon Music? It has all those same features.

Amazon music has two variants, the kind that comes with prime, and unlimited. The unlimited variety is price competitive with Apple Music I believe.

My experience with the prime version has been poor. Aside from selection, it is just not a well written service. Replay bugs are common, and it regularly decides to change what station I was listening to for no discernible reason. The “stations” are clearly just playlists, because if you listen long enough they end up looping.

If it wasn’t free, I wouldn’t use it.

Apple Music is mostly human-curated, Spotify is programmatic. That’s why I prefer thr latter.

That's incorrect. Apple Music have a lot of programmatic recommendations. New Music Mix is programmatic. As is clicking on any song and creation a station from it.

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