EDIT, 5/20/25: Decided to just remove the section trashing on Spotify because when I came in here to change something it just felt out of place with the rest of this piece. Spotify sucks for different reasons, it'll get its time in the limelight. But not now.
I will tell anyone with ears that I vehemently, intensely carry a deep seated hatred for Apple Music. Same goes for Spotify, don't worry. But Apple Music, that one specifically pissed me off on such a deep level that maybe it'd be good to put it in one place why I hate it oh so very much.
Apple's music pedigree is no joke; while they weren't the first to market with an MP3 player, the iPod and iTunes Music Store brought this then-new concept to the masses and convinced the dinosaurs at the record labels to hop on board with the idea of digital music sales. While some might consider the iPod a relic in this day of paying a subscription for a limitless collection of music, it did become such an iconic staple of the 00s that it is revered much like the Walkman is.
Apple has even done well to preserve the legacy they created to this day: Modern macOS releases (and Apple Devices/Music for Windows) still support iPods all the way back to the first gen (provided you have the proper adapters for FireWire). Compare and contrast to the Zune, which Microsoft wasted no time in trying to wash its hands of once Windows Phone 8 released (and no longer depended on the Zune syncing protocol that WP7 used).
Apple's music chops is what makes the handling of Apple Music even more puzzling and infuriating to me. Given how much Spotify was taking off and Apple's legacy in digital music, in hindsight it would have been surprising to not see them hop on the streaming bandwagon at some point.
The implementation is where I have an issue with it. Rather than making Apple Music its own app, Apple did that thing it does and just decided to helpfully integrate it with the original Music app (formerly just named "iPod" in old versions of iOS) that handled your local library and iTunes Match, if you bothered to use that. (And unlike Apple Music, if you never interacted with iTunes Match or iCloud Music Library, it for the most part stayed completely out of your way and never showed its face.)
This was fine and not at all unprecedented: Google Play Music (RIP) did this to great effect: Google rolled out a streaming service called Google Play Music All Access (that's a mouthful) and it too integrated with Play Music, but it never came at a cost to those who opted to use Play Music to play local files. It never got in the way, it never obscured anything (as far as I know, I am 100% recalling this from memory), it just stayed helpfully in the corner, ready to spring to life if you went out of your way to invoke it.
Apple Music did not do this. Apple really, really wanted you to know that they launched a new streaming service, and that they were offering a three month free trial to really sell you on it. So on June 30th, 2015, after we finished installing iOS 8.4 on our devices, we went to Music and got barred off from accessing our library because we had to clear an ad for Apple Music before we could actually use the app as we did prior.
Worse yet, even if you didn't accept the free trial, Apple Music left all sorts of detritus all over the UI, begging you to interact with it, which would proc another ad for that free trial. Some would say this is whatever, just dance around the new junk littered throughout and keep on keepin' on, but this angered me deeply, because Apple took a previously decent app (and in fact, the only app you could use for local files synced from iTunes, at the time) and crapped it up to push their streaming service I had no interest in.
Let's pause this tirade for a second. Let's assume you were, in fact, curious, and decided to try this whole thing out. The crappy implementation of Apple Music doesn't even stop at the ads it used to throw at you! No, Apple Music also included iCloud Music Library, and to properly use Apple Music (as in, to be able to cache songs for offline, and to be able to save music rather than going on a search for it every time you wanted to play it) you had to have iCloud Music Library on.
iCloud Music Library in my experience was (and maybe still is, I'm not trusting it again) an unmitigated disaster. On the surface, it seems great! It'll mirror your library to Apple's servers and keep it in sync with all your devices and computers automatically. Great! The problem is--to save on server-side storage--it'll match music to files Apple already has on hand, as to not have a million discrete copies of God Bless Tiny Tim for everyone that has that album in their library. Quelle surprise, this function would very frequently misstep.
In my case, it would either flag files I actually own as "unplayable in your region", it would replace them with the wrong versions (or if I had the original masters of some albums and the artist later revised that album with changes, the original album would be lost, replaced with the new version), or explicit songs would be replaced with clean versions. If I didn't have a full backup of my local library, this would have been catastrophic.
Worse, the only way to solve a mismatch or an unplayable file? Delete and re-add it from the main computer's library. Which doesn't do me a whole lot of good if I'm on the road and my computer's at home.
This wouldn't be an issue if iCloud Music Library wasn't essentially a condition of using Apple Music. But it is. Paying monthly for music isn't bad enough as it is, now you have to cede control of the files you already own to use the service.
Major point for Spotify and literally every other service here that doesn't do that.
Back to trashing on Apple Music's invasion of the Music app: It wasn't enough for Apple that there was streaming cruft littered throughout the Music app and and you had to dismiss an ad to get back into your library after 8.4 was installed. No, that ad would reappear at random and had to be dismissed every few launches of Music. This was immensely infuriating as I lived in an area with subpar cellular service at the time, and the ad would have to be fetched from Apple's servers every time it popped up. If I wasn't on Wi-Fi, the ad wouldn't finish loading sometimes, and I'd be effectively locked out of the Music app until the ad could finish loading. Great.
Thankfully, at the time a lot of us were still doing local files and our voices were loud enough that Apple heard us and gave us a toggle in settings to kill Apple Music once and for all. Unfortunately, this didn't clean up all the streaming cruft from the Music app. There were still things like trending searches and whatnot. But boy howdy, it was a big improvement. Even though Apple would slyly toggle Apple Music back on at random after an iOS update.
But has it gotten better?
Fast forward a few years. Do you think Apple got any better about being total dicks about Apple Music? Ha. Haha. No.
The Music app in modern iOS versions still has a huge lot of Apple Music cruft in the search tab, where it will show you a tile of genres and seasonal crap. Even if Apple Music is turned off. As you might guess, all of this requires a subscription and WILL proc an ad if tapped.
It feels dark patterned (if that's the right term for this) to hell, a bunch of elements screaming "touch me!" to give Apple the opportunity to cram another ad down your gullet.
(And in iOS 18, Apple has gotten worse about this, though I am unsure if it's a bug or intentional: If you tap the text box in the Music app's search tab, on iOS 17 the two tabs--if Apple Music is turned off--will be Radio (which doesn't require a subscription, necessarily, so it gets a pass) and Your Library, and Music will remember whichever one you previously had selected. On iOS 18, Radio is replaced with Apple Music regardless of if it is turned on or off, and the search will always default to searching Apple Music. It does not remember your last selection.)
Not even traditional computer operating systems are immune! On macOS Monterey, Apple had completely nuked the Apple Music toggle until it was added back in 12.3. On Windows, since Apple Music's dedicated app has replaced iTunes, now, there is no longer a toggle. You get the streaming detritus all up in your grill (along with the aforementioned search behavior seen in iOS 18, above) with no way to turn it off. Wonderful. I'll stay on iTunes until it dies, thanks.
I've always carried this hatred, this disappointment, because it felt like I bought into the Apple ecosystem specifically to avoid hubris like this. Apple was (and still is, in some respects) the company that seemingly was the best about respecting you when you said no, and obeying your boundaries. (This is the same company that--in the sea of all the AI bullshit--has their implementation of it be completely opt-in whilst everyone else is forcing it on you no matter what your preference. The duality of Apple, I guess. Well that didn't last too long, did it? Apple really must hate nice things in their endless pursuit of pleasing their shareholders. Sigh.)
Apple Music wasn't that. Apple Music wouldn't take no for an answer, it would operate under the assumption that every no is a thinly-veiled yes, and that it'll get you at some point. To me, it marked when Apple started down the road of effectively becoming no better than the rest of the tech industry after years of feeling like a bastion of hope against the worst parts of it.
Even more infuriating were the people who would punch down on people like me and claim we're overreacting, and to just "deal with it". This only made my irritation with everything worse, and arguably is the reason this bullshit keeps fucking happening. Because no one is willing to put their foot down and say no, the buck stops right here, right now.
Thankfully there are people out there doing exactly that, like Ed Zitron (whose piece inspired me to write this because a lot of what he talks about in the first half of Never Forgive Them really does a good job of summing up my feelings about, well, Apple being a little shit). After so many years of people telling you that you're overreacting and to just roll over and deal, it's nice to see someone on the same page telling you that no, nothing is actually wrong with you. The tech industry has failed you. This is not your fault.
As such, I'm hoping that in writing this, someone else in my shoes gets some validation and feels that no, they're not alone, and their feelings are valid.