The yearly tradition in the music streaming world is here for those who celebrate. Today, Spotify Wrapped, the music streaming service's yearly celebration of your musical choices, dropped for all users of the service.
Spotify Wrapped has become...an event. Over the years, the company has added more and more fanfare for the event. Not only can you go through an Instagram-like story of your entire year's musical journey but, this year, the company also brought podcasts into the picture as well.
In addition, Spotify users now have access to their "Top Songs 2021" and "Your Artists Revealed" playlists. The first doesn't require any explanation. The second is an interesting playlist that includes handpicked songs and interviews from some of your favorite artists.
People love to share their Spotify Wrapped with friends, family, and social media. People love to make fun of the whole thing but, for anyone who loves music and, more importantly, loves to share and have it shared with others, it's a great time of the year to bond with people over music. It's also a lot of fun to poke fun at the music that ends up on everyone's playlist (my top song of the year, for example, is a remix of Imagine Dragons' "Radioactive." I wear this badge with honor).
While I was enjoying going through my "Top Songs 2021" playlist and enjoying Spotify Wrapped day, I came across this tweet from photographer Tyler Stalman. More importantly, I found this comment on his post:
Curious if you can go further. Apple Music is slow to load on all devices. Mac app is unuseable. iPhone/iPad/Mac can't talk to each other. Playlists aren't as good. Horrible tracking of liked songs. I want to use Apple Music. But it's so bad. Why do you use over Spotify?Curious if you can go further. Apple Music is slow to load on all devices. Mac app is unuseable. iPhone/iPad/Mac can't talk to each other. Playlists aren't as good. Horrible tracking of liked songs. I want to use Apple Music. But it's so bad. Why do you use over Spotify?— Mike McDonald (@mikegmcdonald) December 2, 2021December 2, 2021
This comment sums up all of my feelings about Apple Music so far. I WANT to use Apple Music. It would be so convienient since it's included with every tier of Apple One, Apple's subscription bundle service. It's also build into all of the Apple things which I own basically all of them. However, the performance issues and weak (in comparison to Spotify) music recommendations are enough to keep me with Spotify.
I actually left Spotify for Apple Music. Twice. For months, I attempted to shrug aside the performance issues with the iPhone app and the fact that the Mac app was there to look clean but do virtually nothing. I tried to trudge through the playlists "Made For Me" which contained music that must have been assembled for me by someone who was rolling a dice. I also tried to get over the fact that the app was, despite Apple practically creating the digital music industry with iTunes, odd to navigate at times. However, after close to a year (both times), I came back to Spotify and was glad I did.
Don't get me wrong, Spotify isn't without its problems either. Support for the HomePod is still nonexistant and, even though they were able to build an Apple Watch app and cellular streaming to it for a while, it took them YEARS to implement the feature. Apple Music even arguably has some design wins over Spotify with its Now Playing screen and more advanced audio features with Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio.
No music streaming service is going to be perfect but, if there ever was one that got as close as possible, it has to be Spotify. The user interface and navigation are clean and easy to understand, the personalized playlists are spot on, and the performance of the app (across mobile and desktop) are really responsive.
Spottify gets the core user experience right and, for that, it gets to roll out quirky but loveable features like Spotify Wrapped.
