If you were a regular coffee buddy of mine you’d already know that my life runs on music. You’d also know that I am in the first year of a PhD program that follows on from completing Honours last year. My study has been fueled on coffee and a lot of music. I estimated that I listened to more than 20,000 songs during my Honours!
So as we catch up on coffee I’d ask you what are you listening to and how are you listening to it? I’d get into the specifics and quickly I’d get to my current dilemma – Apple Music or Spotify supported by a Pandora. You of course were expecting the topic of conversation over coffee to be on the US elections and its impact on us in Australia!
Before you had a chance to change the topic I’d continue with my topic telling you that I like all three. I’d quickly explain that I see Pandora as a great companion to my mainstays of Spotify and Apple Music. Pandora is easy as the music is selected for me and with the best part of a thousand Thumbprints Pandora makes listening easy.
However if I want to listen to something specific Pandora’s greatest asset, that it does it all for you becomes a problem, so its off to either Spotify or Apple Music.
I’d explain to you the history of how a couple of years ago I moved from iTunes to Spotify. As I transitioned away from CDs I’d found iTunes an easy way to carry all my own music with me. This was because I had downloaded my hundreds of CDs to my iTunes Library via iTunes Match. That way my CDs were available everywhere on my iPod, particularly with the work travel timetable I was on at the time. About the same time as my iPod froze for the last time I also decided that buying CDs from the almost nonexistent CD Stores in Adelaide was no longer satisfying as they didn’t have the range and with that I moved to Spotify.
It was initially a bit of a hassle finding what I liked but I got used to it and at the same time Spotify got better. As a Premium user, that is I pay for it, I was able to download music so I could listen offline solving a dilemma of listening while traveling which I was still doing. Continue reading