[danpalmer]

I find Apple Music materially different on some of these. The UX of the music app for Mac sucks, but I use other software to interact with it (Raycast) so rarely touch the app itself – you can't do that with Spotify with anywhere near the same success. The Music app for iOS is really nice in my experience. The Podcast experience is entirely separate, and based mostly on open standards (although Apple have an opt-in additional proprietary layer). And Apple pay ~2x what Spotify do for streams. Lastly, it syncs my music that isn't on Apple Music, which Spotify cannot do, so I can still buy music elsewhere (like Bandcamp) and have it all in the same library.

It's not perfect, I'd still prefer streaming money to be distributed in a better way, and the apps could be better, but for me it's noticeably better on many fronts. I've also heard good things about Tidal in a few different ways – they pay even more for streams and have higher bitrate streaming I think. Both are good ways of pushing back against Spotify's control of the industry.