I’m not sure exactly when I signed up for Spotify, but according to my email archive, it’s been at least 10 years – and quite possibly much longer than that (the music streaming service launched in the UK in 2009). Honestly, I’ve loved it, and having access to a catalog of tens of millions of songs has transformed how I listen to music, along with many others.
However, with a new year audit of my many, many digital subscriptions imminent, I’m ready to return to my first digital music love: Apple Music (or iTunes, as it used to be). There’s one main reason and several secondary reasons why I’m making the switch as I’ll get into here.
If you’re weighing up your own relationship to the best music streaming services then you might find this perspective helpful – especially if you’ve been thinking of switching away from Spotify or wondering what Apple Music has to offer. Don’t stick with your current music streaming service just out of habit.
The digital listening revolution
Some context is probably going to be helpful to understand why I’m switching to Apple Music. I bought into the digital music revolution very early, being a teenager during the time when MP3s finally got digital audio tracks down to a reasonable size and internet speeds improved enough to share them online.
While I was still buying music on CD, I was patiently ripping everything and feeding it into Winamp and Windows Media Player – and then later iTunes not long after it first appeared on Windows in 2003. Being able to store hundreds of albums on a single device seemed like magic at the time.
iTunes eventually morphed into Apple Music of course, but my history with the software goes way, way back – and as I’ll get into, that past history helps to explain why I’m returning to Apple Music again. I’ve always liked having my own copies of my music, rather than renting everything for a monthly fee, though I can see the advantages of both.
Apple Music’s history, iTunes and all, means it works slightly differently to Spotify, YouTube Music, Deezer, Amazon Prime Music, Tidal, and any others I might have forgotten. It was originally designed to be a desktop application, playing tunes from a local music library, and for me that still counts in its favor in 2025.
Why I’m heading back to Apple Music
There’s one main reason why I’m heading back to Apple Music: I miss the smart playlists that you can customize yourself. No other music app or streaming service really comes close to letting you queue up specific songs that match specific criteria, and it gives me much more control over my music catalog and what I listen to.
If you’re completely bemused by what smart playlists are, they let you build playlists that include (for example) ‘five-star songs by my favorite artists that I haven’t heard in a month’, or ‘electronic lo-fi music released in the last five years’, or ‘the 100 songs I’ve listened to least from all those added to my library in the last six months’.
You can go into incredible detail with this. Before I got lazy and started just clicking on whatever popped up in my Spotify recommendations, I had put together an intricate, multi-layered, nested master playlist that carefully balanced new music with old music, prioritizing my favorite artists and recent tunes but also leaving room for more obscure cuts from the back catalog.
Importantly, once a track is played in this playlist, the playlist criteria means it won’t appear again for at least three months. I can just stick it on and it auto-refreshes through the day, making sure that I’m not neglecting the far reaches of my music library, while not letting my listening be dominated by old tracks I’ve heard a thousand times, or by artists I like but don’t love.
There’s currently no way you can do that with Spotify, even if Prompted Playlists are coming to offer something similar – I feel like by accepting whatever Spotify throws my way I’m forgetting a lot of the bands I’ve enjoyed in years gone by, or maybe heard once or twice and never properly stuck with. With Apple Music I get to choose my own algorithm to surface tracks from all the music I’ve ever liked.
Other Apple Music features
There are other reasons I’m hankering to go back to Apple Music. While other streaming services (including Spotify) let you add local audio files you’ve ripped from CDs in years gone by (see above), Apple Music does this the best: you can seamlessly blend together local tracks with songs from the cloud.
And if I ever do decide to quit streaming music altogether, I can use Apple Music for free with all of the audio files I’ve ripped and purchased. I won’t suddenly lose access to my playlists, or have to listen to adverts – I can still buy the music that I really like digitally, without paying a monthly fee to rent all the music ever made.
What’s more, some of the historical drawbacks of Apple Music have been dealt with in recent times. For example, whereas it was once exclusive to Apple devices with the exception of the (somewhat inferior) Windows app, now the Windows program is much improved, and you can get at Apple Music on the web and on Android as well.
Apple has tidied up its software too, moving TV shows, movies, and podcasts away into separate apps so that Apple Music is now all about Apple Music (in the old iTunes days, everything was squished together).
I’m looking forward to a new future with Apple Music – but I’ll hang on to my free Spotify account too, just in case.
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