Spotify is technically a dollar cheaper for a student subscription, and it gets you access to Hulu too, but I already pay for Hulu so we’ll just ignore that. If I look up a new song, my screen is formatted the same way it was when I was younger, only instead of the option to buy the song for $1.29, I can simply hit “add to library.” Songs are added directly to my library as if I really owned them, and paying $5.99 a month for unlimited songs is a much better deal than constantly multiplying $1.29 whenever I hyperfixate on a new artist or album. I’ve used that same app on my phone screen to access my music even before I began paying for Apple Music, and the clean user interface looks no different. But the two have now merged together into a single app. My transition from iTunes to Apple Music was an easy one - when I upgraded my iPhone during my freshman year of college, my new plan came with three free months of the service, and I’ve never looked back.Īpple Music is separate from iTunes, of course - Apple Music is Apple’s streaming service, launched in 2015, while iTunes is the media library and player itself. An iTunes gift card was, and continues to be, at the top of my Christmas and birthday wish lists. I still remember buying songs with my parents’ account on the old computer in my den, then discovering my now-favorite albums with my own account and loading them onto all of the iPods and iPhones I’ve had over the years. My first answer to this question is that I use the service out of nostalgia.

But I will tell you why I’ll defend Apple Music until the day I die. Look, I’m not here to tell you what apps you should or shouldn’t use. When I tell somebody for the first time that I am an Apple Music user, I am usually met with the same, one-word question: “ Why?” From there, sometimes they launch into telling me why they prefer a different streaming service - maybe it’s cheaper, or maybe it has a bundle with a TV subscription. With that comes a question of which services are better than others, an argument I’ve found myself in more times than I can count. It’s no surprise that, given the vastness of the digital world, there are several different services that are dedicated specifically to streaming music.

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