Good explanation. Apple Music is still solid for me and I greatly prefer it over Spotify since I prefer listening to and collecting albums over playlists. Am also not a fan of what they’ve done with podcasts, the overall sound quality or the integration with the products I use.

While not ideal, I’ve found that most of the songs or music removed is due to some weird licensing issue and is still there. For example Wolfmother’s first album needing to be re-added as the 10th anniversary edition. Kind of annoying still but manageable.

I also have no interest in the Spotify “value adds”: they add no value for me. Last year I did try to leave, with their focus on podcasts that seem actively harmful to society, but their play lists are just the way I like to listen to music. Apple Music kept annoying me with focus on albums, and iverly targeted play lists, so I did come back

My fourth issue is just the number of tracks that are no longer available on Spotify from my library.

Yes this is what led me back to buying and downloading music again to keep a local back up of.

I use podcast addict. It works.

I get the podcast thing. I never use it, and I don’t think most others do. I’m hoping they just kill the idea at some point but who knows.

The library used to be more straightforward, but in the most recent updates or at least since I’ve started using it again it’s seemed much more playlist focused. To me, this actually makes more sense - with iTunes the “universe” of music is what I have downloaded, with Spotify it doesn’t really matter what’s in my library, everything is already accessible. Rarely do I just browse by artist in my library when using Spotify.

That being said, I do like to add music to iTunes still and sync it to my iPod as I have no faith that Spotify will be around for my entire lifespan.

I’d love to switch to Apple Music. I wish it’s let you add an artist to your library instead of individually doing all their albums.

Amazon music has held my attention for several years now

The podcast thing is not Spotify’s fault, it’s an industry-wide thing.

As podcasting took off, the most popular podcast hosts wanted to be fairly paid for their stardom. An exclusive distribution deal is the easiest way for the podcaster, who otherwise would have to grind their audience with paid subscriptions or intrusive sponsorships.