It has been two years since I left my gorgeous collection of music, which I have been collecting, grooming and cherishing since about the fifth grade of school, carefully sorting tracks, prescribing the correct ID3 tags, adding the correct album covers and trying to organize everything as correctly as possible. For two years now I have been listening to music using the Google Play Music service and until recently, frankly, I thought it was the best streaming audio service in the world, and also inexpensive and allows you to save music and listen to it offline. I even survived the limitation of ten connected devices, although it was difficult and unpleasant. But in recent months something has become lacking. At first, I did not understand what exactly, and then I installed Spotify for a try and now I regret that I spent two years on Play Music. Because Spotify is literally better at everything. In my opinion, this is simply the best music service in the world today, and even problems with its availability in Russia cannot spoil the impression of it. Let's go under the cat, I'll tell you why everything is so.
Spotify, like Google Play Music, has a huge music base. I have not studied the issue thoroughly, so I cannot say which service has a larger base of performers, but I know for sure that both there and there it is impressive, you can even find very rare groups. That is, in this sense, Spotify is at least no worse, and then power begins.
Spotify has an amazing recommendation system and is custom as well as system-generated based on your playlists preferences. Google Play Music doesn't even come close. You say – 'Why do I need this? I collect my own playlists and listen to what I want at the moment! ' That's about what I thought. The first year I listened to everything I was looking for in Play Music, I made playlists myself, but over time it gets boring. In the end, it turns out that such a service is fundamentally no different from your collection of music on your hard drive. Yes, Google collects something there, maintains some statistics, sometimes recommends me some strange playlists, but almost all recommendations are 'past the box office'. The service even analyzes videos that I watched on YouTube, so if after watching a game video or a trailer I accidentally poke, conventionally, on Justin Bieber's album in the ad block or in the video 'matrix' and YouTube will play me the first couple of seconds, after a day another Google Play Music, with a sense of accomplishment, will offer me the entire Bieber collection marked 'Recommended for you'. Very funny.
On Spotify, I don't know the algorithm for creating playlists, but it works much more accurately and after a week of using the service, it offers me incredibly cool selections. But that's not even the point, Spotify has tons of custom playlists and playlists collected by people from Spotify itself, and they're really cool.
In Google Play Music there are 'radio stations' and there you can select a category or, for example, music for a certain mood. In the Russian version of the service, these are about the following lists: Heartbreakers with a guitar, Go to hell !, Modern troubadours, Just a guy with a guitar, Lulling voices of beautiful sirens, Sleepy acoustics, Rocking to the bass, Highway rock star and so on. Who, who translated it and what do all these lists mean? There are not many lists, about a hundred, it is in all categories and subsections. Each list contains 10-15 tracks. Very little. Firstly, Spotify does not have this strange translation and the lists themselves are organized more transparently and clearly. Secondly, there are very, very many of them, and each list contains 50 tracks.
You might say that I described everything too messy and there are no obvious advantages of Spotify, but here it's all a matter of personal experience. I used Google Play Music for two years and as soon as I switched to Spotify, I started discovering dozens of new artists, and it was only a week. For the previous two years, I have mainly listened to everything that previously formed my music collection. That is, Google Play Music is a good choice if you know which particular artist you want to listen to and are ready to collect playlists for yourself. That is, it is more a music library, not a service. Spotify can do everything that Google Play Music can do – but it's also a powerful service with list generation, recommendations, hundreds of cool playlists. It's just another level.
One problem is that in order to listen to it, you will have to download the application and register using a VPN, because if you log in from a Russian IP, Spotify will not let you do either the first or the second.
