Best music streaming UX— 2021 edition (India)
Comparison of user experiences on Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, and Apple Music iOS apps
Music listening has come a long way from the time of buying a cassette/ CD to being able to stream any track in the world at any time on your mobile device. Being a music lover, I spend a lot of time listening to several types of music. And, as a product manager, I can’t stop myself from analyzing these apps to understand what differentiates a good from a great user experience (UX).
For this comparison, I picked the the iOS apps of the four big shots in the music streaming space — Spotify, Apple, Google, and Amazon. I will be applying a UX lens and not considering the breadth of content, which is also a big success factor for streaming apps. Taking a customer perspective, I picked two key scenarios (aka ‘jobs to be done’).
- À la carte: I know what I want to hear. It could be a particular song, album, or an artist.
- Surprise-me: I just want to play some music and have nothing specific in mind. This could also be called a discovery phase.
Let the streaming wars begin!
À la carte
I wanted to play the song ‘Yun hi’ from album ‘Tanu weds Manu’ in all the four apps.
In order to search, I had to open the app first and was greeted by the home screen. Even before going to search, some interesting observations on the home screen — Apple Music has two tabs called Listen Now and Browse and I couldn’t really understand the difference between the two. Both of them had playlists/ albums for me to play. Amazon Music calls its search as Find. All of them have a “Library” tab and except for YouTube Music, all of them have a Search tab. YouTube music has a search icon on top next to profile. This is probably to maintain consistency with the YouTube app that has similar positioning for Search.
On the search landing page, it’s uncanny how similar Apple Music and Spotify are — the use of colors, highlighting genres/categories etc. Both use ‘Search’ as a place to Browse. Curious to know why Apple does it despite having a separate tab named Browse. Amazon is neither here nor there. It allows you to browse Stations and Playlists but not genres/categories. YouTube Music keeps it simple possibly to avoid distractions from your search.
The search experience was similar across all apps except Amazon Music. Apple Music and Spotify show you search results that are directly clickable. Amazon Music just shows search suggestions while YouTube Music does both — shows suggestions and playable songs. Amazon Music forced me to either click on the search suggestion or hit search on the keyboard to see the search results and then click again to play the song. The extra click will soon get annoying for someone like me who randomly remembers a song throughout the day and wants to play it quickly.
Verdict: Apple Music and Spotify were slightly ahead with their visual search landing page with YouTube Music pretty close. Amazon Music was clearly the worst, needing an extra click to play a song.
Surprise-me
This category was harder to test as personalization usually drives a lot of recommendations on all of these apps. I regularly use Spotify for playing music from my phone and Amazon Music to play music on my Echo devices so both of these apps know what I listen to. I subscribed to Apple Music and YouTube Music only for this comparison and hence both these apps didn’t have my listening history. They did know my favorite artists since I provided that information as part of the first run experience (FRE).
To keep things fair, I stayed away from playlists personalized based on what I like/listen. Instead, I looked for song radios. By radio, I mean songs auto-played based on a particular song — ‘Khaabon ke Parinday’. I rated the recommendations based on if I liked the songs, how “related” they felt to the picked song, and if it was a good mix of popular and not-so-popular but good songs. I feel it’s important to have the right mix to keep the listener engaged and discover new songs in the process.
For this one, I did not do a side-by-side comparison as each of them had their own ways to accomplish this.
Apple Music
Since Apple Music has a separate tab for Radio, I started there to see if there was an option to start a radio based on a song. I could play a radio based on artist, genre, and a bunch of other stuff but not from a song. Then I decided to search for the song and while the song was playing, I clicked on the options (three dots) and there it was — “Create Station”. This added a couple of songs to the queue. The frustrating bit was that I could not see the full list of upcoming songs, just the next one. It’s an interesting UX decision since Radio is indeed about being surprised but I do want to be in control of what’s playing. I waited for a bit to see what songs came up. I liked the list of songs and almost all of them felt “related” to ‘Khaabon ke Parinday’.
Spotify
Spotify’s radio experience was seamless. Of course, being familiar with the experience helped. You can go to a song radio right from the search results. It creates a playlist of sorts that you can save for future. In addition, you can add/remove songs to the list. I love this implementation as it gives a lot of flexibility to the user and keeps them in complete control. I loved the song recommendations here as well. Almost all of them were spot on and in the same zone as ‘Khaabon ke parinday’. In addition, this seemed to be an interesting mix of popular and not-so-popular songs. For example, ‘Kabhi kabhi Aditi’ is a superhit number while ‘Alvida’ from D-day or ‘Manzar Naya’ from Rock On 2, not so much.
Amazon Music
On Amazon Music, I couldn’t find a ‘Start radio’ either on the search results page or on the song itself. It had an X-Ray button that showed what playlist the song is featured in and the song credits. It’s an interesting way to discover related songs but could be a hit or miss depending on the playlist you find. Still determined to find the radio feature, I poked around and found something which is probably closest to what I was looking for — Customers also listened to.
This seems to be directly coming from the highly popular widget on amazon.com — customers who viewed this item also viewed. I have a couple of problems with this. First, I didn’t like being called a customer here as I have already paid for the subscription and there’s nothing to buy here. “You might also like” will probably work better. Second, it’s expected that the user will pick the songs and add to their queue. I strongly feel that removing a few songs that you don’t like is easier than adding a bunch of songs one by one. In addition, there is no way to bulk add the songs to my queue.
The list of songs was mostly on point even if all of them were popular numbers i.e. the algorithm was doing what it promised — showing what other users were listening to.
The story isn’t over yet. Once the song finished, I saw a message — Autoplay enabled.
All this time I was looking for a radio feature and Autoplay was already enabled. This seems like a major miss. Why couldn’t this be messaged subtly upfront? The next song in Autoplay is a surprise similar to Apple Music and there is no way to edit/remove upcoming songs. The list of songs (had to keep skipping to see a few) is quite different from the list that shows up in “Customers also listened to”. I am curious how the recommendation algorithm here differs from the other one as the two features are very similar and could probably use the same logic.
YouTube Music
YouTube Music was straightforward as well. Similar to Spotify, one can start a song radio right from search results and it populates the queue with a bunch of songs. No problems there.
The list of songs that came up were mostly on point. It suggested mostly superhit numbers that were similar. It might be using the same recommendation engine as YouTube. I wouldn’t expect to find a hidden gem or an unheard song in this list.
Conclusion
Here’s my final ranking from a UX perspective:
- Spotify
- YouTube Music
- Apple Music
- Amazon Music
Spotify was a clear winner with a highly refined app and UX details thought through. It also gave me the best autoplay recommendations. YouTube Music and Apple Music were close at 2nd and 3rd spot with YouTube Music winning by a thin margin due to a great radio experience. At the last place, we have Amazon Music with weird UX choices all over.
