There are now several music streaming services to choose from, and at first glance they may all seem quite similar: tens of millions of tracks to stream, mobile and desktop apps, offline caching options, and everything else. The differences are not always clear, but Here we’ll highlight one of the most important in three of the greatest services available. We have already spoken bit rate differencesbut it depends on how you use each service.
Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube Music are certainly well-known and top-notch, and all offer a comprehensive streaming music library along with a ton of useful features. However, the way music playback works on Spotify and the way music playback works on Apple Music and YouTube Music is fundamentally different – and if you’ve only ever used one of these services, it’s something you may not be aware of.
Play music on Spotify
You can sideload Spotify playlists to a multitude of devices: phones, tablets, smartwatches, laptops, smart speakers, car stereos, TVs, and more. There’s even a web player as well as desktop apps, so there are plenty of options to choose from when listening to music on Windows or macOS. Most of Spotify’s features are also available on all these different devices.
However, despite all these device options, you can only play one Spotify playlist at a time. Launch a playlist on your Windows computer and the same playlist appears on Android; Start listening to a series of songs in the TV app and those same songs are loaded into the web player. Switching playlists on one device does the same thing everywhere.
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You can even control playback on one device from a different device, thanks to Spotify Connect: Start playback on a Mac and you can start and stop it from an iPhone, for example. It works wonders in certain situations, like when you’re driving away and want to continue listening to the same tunes you just listened to on your smartphone.
Where this doesn’t work so well is if, for example, you want to queue a playlist in the kitchen and another playlist in the office. Although it only takes a few clicks or taps to switch playlists when you change locations, Spotify won’t remember where you were in each playlist as you move between them. It’s not as convenient as having two playlists on the go simultaneously on two different sites. devices.
There are some workarounds: you can take one of your devices offline and use cached tracks, which will allow separate listening that doesn’t sync with your other devices, but leaves you without a connection to the web on that particular device. You can also set up a family account, which gives you separate profiles for individual people and separate listening activity. However, by using one account, your listening is synced across all devices Spotify is installed on, for better or worse.
Listen to music on Apple Music and YouTube Music
Like Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube Music are available on a multitude of devices. Apple even offers an Apple Music app for Android. There’s plenty of support on smart speakers and TV platforms and car dashboards, and both of these music streaming services can be played in a web browser tab, also. Apple Music also has a full desktop program that you can use.
The crucial difference between these two services and Spotify is that your listening is separate across all of your devices. You can queue a series of albums on your Mac, for example, and another set of albums on your iPhone. You can even open multiple browser tabs for YouTube Music at the same time, all playing different tunes.
This works great if you regularly jump between different types of music: if you switch between playlists of catchy pop and long instruments at work, for example, you can open each playlist in a separate browser tab. Your position in each browser tab is remembered, so you don’t have to start from the beginning.
Where it’s not as good is when you jump between different rooms or different devices: playback is not automatically synchronized between applications, as is the case with Spotify. There are other options to quickly switch the same music between devices, including AirPlay and the Chromecast protocol, but if you open the app on your phone, you won’t instantly see what you just listened to on your laptop.
These are two quite different ways of managing music streaming and everyone will have their preference., as they can both be useful. However, this is something that is not often mentioned when these streaming services are compared, and it shows that they are not as similar and interchangeable as one might think.
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