The main difference between Spotify and Apple or Youtube Music

There are now so many music streaming services to choose from, and at first glance they can all look pretty much the same — tens of millions of tracks for streaming, mobile and desktop apps, offline caching options, and more. It is not always clear where the differences are, however Here we are going to highlight one of the most important of three of the biggest services out there. We have already talked about Bitrate differencesbut this has to do with how you use each service.

Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube Music are certainly well known and highly rated, and they all offer a comprehensive streaming music library as well as plenty of useful features. However, the way music playback works on Spotify and the way music playback works on Apple Music and YouTube Music are fundamentally different — and if you’ve only used one of these services, you may not be familiar with it.

Play music on Spotify

You can upload Spotify playlists to a whole host of devices: phones, tablets, smartwatches, laptops, smart speakers, car stereos, TVs, and more. There’s also a web player in addition to the desktop apps, so you have a choice of options when you’re listening to music on Windows or macOS. Most of Spotify’s functionality is available across all of these different devices, too.

However, despite all these device options, you can only play one Spotify playlist at a time. Play a playlist on your Windows PC, and the same playlist will appear on Android; Start listening to a series of tunes in the TV app and those same tunes load into the web player. Changing playlists on one device is the same procedure everywhere.

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You can even control playback on one device from a different device, thanks to Spotify Connect: Start up on your Mac and you can start and stop it from your iPhone, for example. This works great in certain situations, like when you’re heading out in the car and want to keep listening to the same tunes you were just enjoying on your smartphone.

Where it doesn’t work well is if, for example, you want to put one playlist in the kitchen and a different playlist in the study. While it only takes a few taps or taps to switch playlists when you switch locations, Spotify won’t remember where you are in each playlist as you flip through them—it’s just not convenient to have two while flipping simultaneously on two different devices.

There are a few workarounds: You can put one of your devices offline and use cached tracks, which will enable separate listening that doesn’t sync with your other devices, but leaves you without a web connection on that particular device. You can also set up a family account, which gives you separate profiles for individuals and separate listening activity. With a single account, listening is synced across every device that has Spotify installed, for better or for worse.

Play music on Apple Music and YouTube Music

Like Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube Music are available on a whole host of devices — Apple even makes an Apple Music app for Android. There’s plenty of support across smart speakers, TV platforms, and car dashboards, and each of these music streaming services can be played in a web browser tab. also. Apple Music It also has a comprehensive desktop software that you can take advantage of.

The fundamental difference between these two services and Spotify is that your listening is separate on all of your devices. You can queue one series of albums on your Mac, For example, and a different series of albums on your iPhone. You can even have several browser tabs open for YouTube Music at the same time, and they all play different tunes.

This works well if you regularly jump between different genres of music: if you switch between playlists of upbeat pop and lengthy instrumentals at work, for example, you can open each playlist in a separate browser tab. Your location is remembered on every browser tab, so you don’t have to keep starting over from scratch.

When is not as good as when You move between different rooms or different devices: Playback doesn’t sync automatically across apps, as it does with Spotify. There are other options for quickly switching the same music between devices, including AirPlay and the Chromecast protocol, but if you open the app on your phone, You won’t immediately see what you were just listening to on your laptop.

These are two very different ways to manage your music stream – and everyone will have their own preference, because both can be beneficial. However, it is something that is not often mentioned when comparing these streaming services, and it goes to show that they are not quite alike and interchangeable as you might think.