It might feel like a lot of hassle to transfer your music library from Spotify to Apple Music, but TuneMyMusic will do most of the work for you. Once the transfer is complete, you can get stuck into enjoying the best Apple Music features, like Live Lyrics and Automatic Downloads. My iTunes says I can't add more Apple-Music-tracks to my iCloud mediathek because I've reached the 100,000 tracks limit but I'm using about 86,000 tracks locally (my own music) and 13,500 tracks from Apple Music. I recently contacted the Apple support but they can't help me yet. At the Apple.com-Website I found this information.
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Spotify leads the music streaming industry worldwide with over 100 million paid subscribers—248 million, including its free version. Features such as its universal device compatibility, dynamic social sharing options, and industry-defining music discovery tools have added to the provider’s immense popularity.
Leading the U.S. market in paid subscribers, Apple Music stands out as one of the largest music streaming services in the world with a library of 60 million songs. Another standout feature is its Beats 1 live radio component with exclusive artist interviews and specially selected playlists.
Apple Music vs. Spotify Premium Overview
Apple Music and Spotify Premium match head-to-head on pricing with their individual monthly and annual costs, six-person family plans, and student discounts. We took a deep dive into both services’ music libraries and averaged the numbers they boasted to present you with a more accurate estimate.
Music library
Spotify and Apple Music add thousands of tracks on a daily basis to their respective catalogs, steadily altering their numbers. Soaring past 40 million tracks, Spotify contributes more than 20,000 new songs per day to its immense library. Its New Releases tab houses the latest tunes, exclusive live sessions, and new singles every Friday. Also, to note, Spotify opens its entire music library to its free subscribers—though, your experience will be peppered with ads and limited to shuffle mode with a handful of skips while using its mobile app.
Spotify’s numbers are rivaled by Apple Music’s growing catalog, which exceeds the latter’s with 60 million songs. Not only does Apple Music have an abundant selection, but it also enters into deals with select artists to release music exclusively through its service before streaming to others. By contrast, Spotify allows Premium subscribers to enjoy new releases for two weeks before making the tracks available to listeners signed up for the free plan.
Music discovery
Whether you’re a free or Premium subscriber, Spotify creates playlists based on your tastes (as tracked by algorithm) and your saved songs within the app. It provides personalized options like “Discover Weekly” and “Daily Mixes.” Both generate selections of your favorite music while also introducing similar songs and artists you may have never heard before.
When you create an account with Apple Music, you’re given the opportunity to choose your favorite artists so Apple’s algorithm can discern your preferences. The service depicts your choices as balls on your screen. When using your mobile device, what starts out as aesthetically pleasing quickly becomes cluttered. This potentially limits discovering new artists and may bog your screen down with numerous visuals. It can also lead to slow data processing speeds.
Offline listening![]()
On paper, both streaming giants offer huge numbers when it comes to downloads. However, you can store almost as many songs as you wish with Apple Music, spanning across ten devices as long as you’re signed in with your Apple ID. The download limit is technically 100,000 tracks—an amount most users would find themselves hard-pressed to fill. Since your iCloud Music Library “matches” music within both your Apple Music and iTunes collections, you maintain access to music from the streaming service as well as tracks accumulated elsewhere right at your fingertips and across all your devices.
Following closely behind, Spotify permits 10,000 downloads. While the service enjoys universal compatibility, it lags behind when it comes to infrastructure. Its offline music isn’t stored in the cloud, so tracks can only be accessed locally through five devices on Spotify’s app.
Streaming quality
The sound quality of Spotify and Apple Music is based on a variety of features, including bit rate, encoding formats, and the age of the music being streamed. Spotify utilizes Ogg Vorbis to encode at 320 kbps, whereas Apple Music streams at 256 kbps in Advanced Audio Coding. Spotify’s larger number is only one in a variety of factors at play. For one, older music is more difficult to judge than newer releases. There are simply more versions to pull from, especially when considering pre-digital recordings. Unless you’re listening closely, it’s difficult to tell the difference between the two services. They’re pretty similar, especially when compared to vinyl, high-quality digital sources, and CDs.
![]() The Bottom Line
If you’re a music enthusiast who loves finding new songs and artists, while easily sharing with friends, you’ll be happy with Spotify. If, on the other hand, you’re more attracted to an enormous music library and want to be among the first to listen to new songs, you can’t go wrong with Apple Music.
Recently Added
Say what you will about the deluge of subscriptions, but I like subscribing to a streaming music service so I can explore music without the stress of having to decide if I want to buy any particular track. The first service I used was the much-missed Rdio. I stuck with Rdio because of its elegant interface even after testing out Apple Music during its free trial (see “Retuning Rdio: Why I Dropped Apple Music,” 7 October 2015). When Rdio went under, I switched to Spotify instead of Apple Music because Spotify’s interface was more focused on discovering and playing music, whereas iTunes was at a particularly low point in Apple’s interface experimentation. I also liked how Spotifycould display lyrics, a feature that wasn’t available in iTunes at the time.
Spotify worked well for me for a while, but in May 2016, the lyrics feature disappeared. Spotify had been working with Musixmatch for lyrics, but said at the time:
Just a heads up that our Lyrics feature on desktop is currently unavailable as we’re making some big improvements to the feature. We’ll share more updates soon. We can also confirm our partnership with Musixmatch is ending. It was a great partnership and there is mutual respect between both companies as our business strategies move us each in different directions.
Alas, Spotify never brought back the lyrics feature. Musixmatch offers standalone Mac and iOS apps that can show lyrics for the currently playing song, but I found using them to be too much trouble most of the time.
Losing lyrics was a blow, but the straw that broke the camel’s back was when I ran headfirst into Spotify’s 10,000 track limit. You read that right — despite the fact that Spotify is a streaming service that contains over 30 million tracks, you cannot add more than 10,000 to your collection. This utterly arbitrary limit was a true deal-breaker.
The limit isn’t new, though I didn’t know about it when I signed up for Spotify. In 2014, user takingbackbenny started a Spotify Community discussion devoted to the limit that has garnered over 4500 votes and generated 300 pages of comments from Spotify users who are shocked that the service would have such a limit. Several years after it started, Spotify staffsaid:
At the moment we don’t have plans to extend the Your Music limit. The reason is because less than 1% of users reach it. The current limit ensures a great experience for 99% of users instead of an “OK” experience for 100%.
Spotify never explains why changing an arbitrary number in the code from 10,000 to 50,000 (Google Play Music’s limit) or 100,000 (Apple Music’s limit) would somehow hurt the experience for those who don’t want to save that many tracks. A Spotify music collection is just a list of tracks, so it’s hard to imagine how allowing that list to exceed 10,000 could cause any problems. Regardless, many people in that discussion (and many other related threads) have said the limit is why they’re leaving Spotify, and it was the key reason for me to pay Apple instead of Spotify for music.
I enjoy following the trail of related or recommended music to find new music from previously unknown artists. When I find music I like, I add it to my library so I can find it again by scrolling through my library, and so additional algorithmic recommendations take it into account. It was all too easy to hit 10,000 tracks doing that.
I was able to export my Spotify collection to a text file (and then into a simple Panorama database), so I could be sure that I wouldn’t lose it, but I wasn’t able to find any automated way to add those tracks to my Apple Music library. (Commenters have recommended several iOS apps that I haven’t had a chance to try yet.) I’m not too bothered by that, since it lets me work through my collection manually. I can add each album back, and if I have time, I can explore more related music. It’s not about efficiency; it’s about wandering through the world’s largest record store. I didn’t even import my collection of music ripped from CDs since I can likely find it all in Apple Music, and it had become rather random anyway.
Apple Music Vs Spotify Download Limit
As much as Apple Music raises Spotify’s track limit tenfold, it’s not a complete win. Spotify did a better job of providing constantly changing selections of music to play. It offered six genre-driven Daily Mix playlists that combined tracks from my collection with related recommendations, and its Discover Weekly playlist was always worthwhile for finding new music.
Spotify Vs Apple Music Download Limit App
In contrast, Apple Music’s My Favorites Mix and My Chill Mix playlists update only once per week and contain just 25 songs, which feels weak. Apple Music also provides some curated playlists and recommended albums, but when I just want to play music without thinking about it, Spotify’s Daily Mixes were nearperfect. Apple Music requires more interaction.
Spotify Vs Apple Music Download Limit Free
Although the interface of iTunes 12.6 has settled down, it’s still confusing and cluttered, thanks to the awkward splits between your library (which might include local music), Apple Music, and the iTunes Store. The iOS Music app has also improved over time, but it still took me a while before I figured out how to turn off shuffle, given that the control was hidden out of sight on my iPhone screen with no indication that scrolling was necessary.
Apple Music Vs Spotify Cost
I can’t say that I’ll stick with Apple Music forever, but with Spotify seemingly uninterested in expanding its limit and providing lyrics, Apple has a better set of features for now. I’m also looking forward to trying the HomePod with it. And if Spotify ever gets its act together, I can always switch back.
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