
This includes two quality levels: 24-bit/48kHz Lossless and 24-bit/192kHz Hi-Res Lossless. There's Lossless to take into account.Īpple launched Lossless as its high-definition audio option, which offers music at a higher fidelity than normal.
#SPOTIFY VS APPLE MUSIC 2022 FOR FREE#
Spotify's apps offer an Ogg Vorbis stream quality equivalent to 160kbps for free users, while its premium service goes up to 320kbps.Īpple Music's standard bitrate is lower at 256kbps for AAC streams, but it's not the end of the story. There's a difference in terms of quality for listening to that music if you look at bitrates. Catalog sizes do matter for more obscure songs that may not usually get much of an audience or alternate versions of albums.īut the bottom line is that each has an awful lot of music for you to get through.Īpple Music offers Spatial Audio and Lossless.

The difference in quantity won't matter for most users, as they will both comfortably cover the vast majority of popular music tracks. There's no point paying for a service if it doesn't have the music you like.Īccording to Spotify, it has "over 82 million tracks, including more than 4 million podcast titles." Meanwhile, Apple offers a more extensive catalog of 90 million songs for listening to. Something that may be more important to users is the catalog of music and content available for listening. They're both here to stay.Īpple Music vs Spotify: Songs and Audio Content They aren't going to disappear overnight suddenly. Neither the size of the subscriber base nor the service age will matter to end users, aside from knowing both have considerable knowledge and size that they will be around for quite some time. It's entirely possible for Apple Music to be overtaken by a competitor, and in a market that grew 26% year-on-year in Q2 2021, that's a lot of potential subscribers to acquire. However, it is closely followed by Amazon Music and Tencent Music with 13% each and 8% for YouTube Music. Spotify says it has 182 million subscribers, with 422 million monthly active users.Īpple Music is Spotify's nearest, albeit still distant, competitor. Spotify is the most popular music streaming service in the world.Īs Apple doesn't offer its subscriber counts regularly, there's no official word on how many subscribe to it. The same research determined that Apple Music was second, catering to 15% of the nearly 524 million global listeners of streaming music services.

Research released in Januarydetermined that Spotify was the biggest globally, with a 31% share in 2021, albeit down from 33% in 2020.

It also wasn't a project that Apple started from scratch, as elements came from Beats Music, the service it bought as part of its broader $3 billion Beats acquisition.Īs the long-time streaming option, Spotify has cemented itself as the 800-pound gorilla of the market.

Of the two, Spotify is the oldest, having been operating since 2006, and so the longest time running in the market.Īpple Music launched much later in 2015, but it benefits from Apple's history with iTunes, which launched in 2001, followed by the iTunes Music Store in 2003. Users settled on one service may not necessarily see much need to switch sides, but there can be benefits to doing so depending on your listening needs. Under closer scrutiny, there are a fair number of differences between the two audio entertainment options. The two seem like similar all-you-can-eat music services from the outside, and they're pretty interchangeable. As the two most prominent on the market, most users will pick one or the other as their service of choice. With many smartphone users regularly listening to music, a subscription to a streaming app is a must. Many apps are trying to keep the attention of subscribers willing to pay a monthly fee, but two giants are taking the most attention at the top of the pile: Spotify and Apple Music. Music streaming is big business, and after years of services being available, it has become a very crowded market. Spotify's App Store icon (left), Apple Music (right)
