I’m a pretty loyal Apple devotee. This story was written on a MacBook; my Instagrams are posted from an iPhone; I stream Netflix through an Apple TV; and up until recently, I had almost always used iTunes as my primary media player, whether through the desktop or mobile platform. But all good — or, in this case, serviceable — things must come to an end, and iTunes’ reign as ZachBook™ Media Player Champion has officially ceased. Spotify is my new music-playing squeeze.
There are some things I’m going to miss about iTunes. Hell, I already miss them. Like all Apple products, its cleanliness and ease of use might be its best asset. No matter which view you’re in — Songs, Albums, Artists, what have you — everything is reasonably organized and a breeze to navigate. And if you’re obsessive-compulsive about your music library, as I am, the ability to customize ID3 tags and album artwork can result in an immaculate music archive.
There are also no limits to your library. Theoretically, you could have every song ever recorded as long as it’s in MP3 form. And as someone who relies pretty heavily on advance releases (for work, of course), the boundless ease of integration is something I value a great deal. This is especially true for iTunes Match subscribers, who pay a measly $24.99 for a year’s worth of streaming your entire music library on all of your Apple devices. Compare that to a monthly fee of $9.99 for Spotify Premium, and you’re saving almost $100 a year.
But with the increased emphasis on streaming media, the iTunes model just simply feels dated, and it’s not at all unreasonable to think that five years from now, the MP3 will be as irrelevant as the compact disc. Because, let’s face it, we value storage on our devices, and if you have a substantial library of MP3s, it’s inevitably going to eat up a huge chunk of your allotted disk space. That’s space you could be using for photos, movies, games, or really anything else other than MP3s.
Spotify’s sleek and practical Albums view.
With Spotify, the disk-space conundrum is mitigated significantly. Just spitballing here, but I’d venture that at least 95 percent of your MP3 library is on Spotify. Since I started transferring my music from iTunes, I’ve freed up over 50 gigabytes of space on my hard drive (and that’s just music from the last two years). And since I’m a Spotify Premium subscriber, all of those songs and albums are available to stream at glorious-sounding bitrate of 320 kilobytes per second, the highest possible rate at which you can listen to an MP3. (By comparison, iTunes Match streams at 256 kbps — still nothing to scoff at.)
But above all else — and this is an area in which iTunes really lags behind — Spotify’s social element makes listening to and sharing music fun. With Spotify’s activity feed, I can compliment friends when I see them listening to, say, the brilliant new Grimes track, or poke fun at them when I see them listening to the mediocre new Modest Mouse album. Similarly, I can create playlists and share them with friends effortlessly. Whereas with iTunes, I couldn’t do that without either burning a CD (yeah, right) or forcing my someone to download MP3s and import them into his or her library. As both a conversation starter and a music-discovery tool, Spotify absolutely slaughters the competition.
There are some significant limitations to Spotify, however — limitations that kept me from making the switch until recently. First and foremost, the integration of local MP3s is lackluster at best … and abysmal at worst. Some of my favorite artists and labels aren’t on the streaming service, so in order to listen to their music through Spotify, I have to keep the MP3 on my hard drive or mobile device, which I wouldn’t mind all that much if the app’s Local Files section wasn’t a travesty to humankind. There shouldn’t even be a Local Files section, honestly; all songs should be consolidated into a single music library. But even if it must be separate, you should at least have the option to change the view to something other than a boring-ass list of songs. Give us the option to view some album art. Let us change those ID3 tags. If our ability to stream certain songs is going to be restricted, at least let us customize the listening experience so it’s not as noticeably intrusive.
Spotify’s boring-ass Local Files view.
But the app has come a long way since its fledgling beginnings. At the very least, they’ve shown a willingness to adapt and add features more often than iTunes. A lot of that stems from the hundreds of third-party extensions available. For instance, the most recent version of Spotify features a Lyrics panel powered by Musixmatch, so you can view the lyrics of the song you’re listening to in real time. As someone who’s terrible at deciphering lyrics without a lyric sheet, this is a huge plus in the Spotify column that iTunes cannot boast. It’s this more forward-thinking and innovative mindset that has me optimistic for Spotify’s future, and why I look forward to immersing myself into the app going forward.
I’m not even taking artist compensation into account here either. Spotify’s less-than-a-penny-per-stream model certainly isn’t perfect, but in an age in which file-sharing has become so commonplace, the fact that we’re even compensating artists at all is a step in the right direction. I recognize that $10 a month for access to millions of songs is basically highway robbery, but I also buy vinyl fairly regularly, wear an embarrassing amount of band T-shirts, and attend as many shows as I can. And now that Spotify has rekindled my music-as-an-experience love affair, I think I’ll be doing those things more often than I was before.
