I canceled my Apple Music Subscription. As noted in this July 2015 posting, their idea of “classical radio” is randomly selecting individual tracks out of larger works. Their hand-curated playlists also contain just one movement of a symphony before jumping over to an unrelated work. This is no worse than Rhapsody (launched 14 years ago), of course, or Google’s comparable service. But Apple Music can’t play on the Sonos and isn’t CD quality like Deezer (HDtracks goes beyond CD quality but isn’t streaming).
Readers: If you’re not classical fans, do you like Apple Music better than the established competitors?
I mostly like it due to iPhone integration. I always select manually what to play though – not much success with their radios.
I tried it for the free trial, but went back to Google Play. Play’s stations are better at genre matching, even taking “human curation” into account, in my opinion. Plus Play “works” on Windows (and Linux), so I can listen at the office on my corporate laptop.
Spotify has worked just fine for me. I’m not aware of any bells and whistles that aren’t supported by Spotify, except possibly playing FLAC. Hand curated playlists, Sonos support, radio stations of various sorts, blah blah, it’s all there.
Their ‘Discover Weekly’ playlist is pretty nifty too. ML that actually works.