Apple Music

About Apple Music

Apple Music is Apple's music subscription: a catalogue of more than 100 million songs, live radio stations with human presenters alongside the algorithmic playlists, and a separate Classical app included at no extra cost. It is the service Apple builds its hardware around, so it arrives preinstalled on everything the company sells and reaches further into those devices than any rival can. It also runs on Android, Windows, games consoles and the web, which is worth saying early, because assuming it does not is the most common thing people get wrong about it. There is no free tier. Everybody pays, and the case for paying rests mostly on audio quality and on how well the service sits inside a house already full of Apple devices.

What the subscription includes

The catalogue has passed 100 million songs and covers the same ground as everything else at this price. What differs is the editorial layer on top of it. Apple Music 1, Apple Music Hits and Apple Music Country are live radio stations with presenters rather than playlists dressed up as stations, and some of that output is listenable without a subscription at all. Apple Music Classical is a separate app with its own catalogue and a search built around composer, work and conductor rather than track title, and it is included rather than sold on top.

Apple Music Sing turns the lyrics view into a karaoke mode with the vocal level on a slider. Music Haptics plays taps and vibrations in time with a track on recent iPhones, which was built as an accessibility feature and works well as one. Playlists can be made collaborative, and offline downloads come with every plan.

Lossless and Spatial Audio, and what actually plays them

This is where Apple has a real lead, and also where the marketing runs ahead of the hardware. Lossless reaches 24-bit/48kHz, Hi-Res Lossless reaches 24-bit/192kHz, and both are part of the standard price rather than an upgrade tier. Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos has no counterpart on Spotify.

The catch is Bluetooth. No AirPods model plays lossless wirelessly, because Apple does not carry a codec that could, and sends compressed AAC instead. AirPods Max manage it over a USB-C cable. HomePods handle lossless up to 24-bit/48kHz. For Hi-Res Lossless from an iPhone you need an external digital-to-analogue converter and wired headphones. Spatial Audio is the opposite case and works almost everywhere Apple sells, across AirPods, Beats, HomePod, iPhone, iPad and Apple TV 4K.

Where it runs

Wider than its reputation suggests. Beyond Apple's own devices there are apps for Android, Windows, PlayStation, Xbox, Roku, and Samsung and LG televisions. It works through Alexa, Sonos and Google Nest speakers, and there is a full player at music.apple.com. A household split between iPhone and Android will not hit a wall here.

What it lacks is an equivalent to Spotify Connect, the handoff that lets a phone act as a remote for whatever is already playing on a speaker. Apple uses AirPlay 2 instead. That is common enough in modern audio equipment, but it is a different mechanism and it does not always behave the same way.

Plans, and when Apple One changes the arithmetic

Apple lists an individual plan at $11.99 a month, a family plan at $19.99 covering up to six people, and a student plan at $6.99 that also carries Apple TV. There is no advertising-supported free tier, which is the clearest difference from Spotify at the moment of signing up.

Apple One bundles Music with iCloud storage and several other services from $19.95 a month. The bundle is worth working out if you already pay separately for iCloud, and worth ignoring if you do not. Prices vary by country, so check the figure in your own store before committing.

What to weigh against Spotify

Sound quality points to Apple. What Hi-Fi rates Apple's formats above Spotify's, and Spatial Audio has no Spotify equivalent. Headline prices sit close together, and Apple's have moved less over the years.

Spotify's advantages sit elsewhere. It has a free tier. It carries podcasts and audiobooks in the same app rather than splitting them across separate ones. Its Connect handoff suits a lot of people better than AirPlay does, and its social and shared-listening features have no real Apple counterpart. Discovery is close to a draw. Both do it well, and which one suits you comes down to taste rather than to which is better built.

Who should subscribe to something else

Subscribe to something else if you will not pay for music at all. Spotify has a free tier and Apple has nothing like it.

Subscribe to something else if podcasts make up half of what you listen to. Apple splits them into a separate app and Spotify does not.

Subscribe to something else if you are paying for lossless and you listen entirely on AirPods. The files will be lossless and the Bluetooth link will not be, so you would be paying for something you cannot hear. Wired headphones with a converter, or a HomePod, are what make that spending count.

And look at Tidal or Qobuz instead if hi-res is the entire point for you and you want a service whose catalogue and tools are organised around it, rather than one where it sits alongside everything else.