When comparing 8 Tracks vs Apple Music, the Slant community recommends Apple Music for most people. In the question“What are the best music streaming services?” Apple Music is ranked 11th while 8 Tracks is ranked 15th. The most important reason people chose Apple Music is:
iTunes has a flat, clean design with playback controls at the top-left, search at top-right and a row of ways to categorize available media beneath that. Plus it can be minimized to take up much less space. The minimized interface is called the MiniPlayer and it can be set to display on top of all other windows. It's possible to show iTunes on top of all other windows when playing movies as well.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Individualistic and personalized user playlists
The site is human-curated not automated. This can give a more personal feel, as each playlist on the music streaming service has been curated by a user.
Pro Great for discovering new music
Due to how the service works, listening to user created playlists allows for pretty good discovery of new or undiscovered bands.
Pro Sleek interface
iTunes has a flat, clean design with playback controls at the top-left, search at top-right and a row of ways to categorize available media beneath that. Plus it can be minimized to take up much less space. The minimized interface is called the MiniPlayer and it can be set to display on top of all other windows. It's possible to show iTunes on top of all other windows when playing movies as well.
Pro Syncs across devices
iTunes can synchronize playback information, podcast subscriptions & settings and automatically download purchases made on other devices.
Pro iTunes Store has a huge selection of media
iTunes has a huge catalog of videos, songs, and podcasts in the iTunes store.
Pro Playlists created by people
The Apple Music streaming service focuses on playlists selected by curators rather than intelligent radios in other streaming services. Choosing playlists selected by the curators improves the experience with another method of music discovery. Of course you can still heart or disheart any song on your own to improve the service's suggestions in the For You section.
Pro Family sharing for up to six devices
Pro Siri integration in a music streaming service
Pro Internet radio
iTunes includes a streaming music service called Radio that creates stations based on chosen genre, song or artist. Requires Apple ID to access.
Pro Airplay support
iTunes allows streaming audio to all Airplay enabled devices within Wi-Fi range. It's possible to select more than one device to play a song at the same time.
Pro Beats 1 Internet radio offers a shared audio experience
Beats 1 is a 24-hour radio station station run by Apple. It is hosted Zane Lowe, Ebro Darden and Julie Adenuga.
Pro Built-in parental controls
iTunes parental controls can be used to deny access to certain parts of iTunes such as podcasts, internet radio, store or shared libraries and restrict access to media that has a certain rating or warnings.
Pro Connect feature allows closer communication with musicians
Musicians post on the Apple Music streaming service about news, ideas, new music etc. You can engage with them directly on the site.
Pro Great podcast integration
Pro Lossless at no additional cost
Includes streaming lossless formats as part of the basic subscription.
Pro Dynamic Crossfade
When crossfade is set to automatic, its length changes based on what's playing to keep the flow between songs.
Pro Programmed DJ Sessions
DJ sets can be listened to like it’s a set.
Cons
Con Poor music streaming service outside of North America
8Tracks has changed its policy for how it supplies music to those outside of North America by not using any of their servers for those users. This change resulted in using Youtube for those users in order to still have a way to add songs to playlists. Sadly using Youtube results in many songs just disappearing and many playlists becoming defunct.
Con Advertisements in free version
Con No way to find certain songs
8 Tracks allows you to search for a playlist based on keywords, then requires you to listen to most of that playlist without skipping. As such, it's not so good for hunting down a specific song, but is great for discovering new music.
Con No free plan
While there's a three month free trial that lets you test out features of the service, Apple Music is a subscription-only deal. There's no ad-supported free version or anything like that.
Con Poor audio quality compared to other services
Con Heavyweight
Appears to get bigger and bigger with each update, without really adding more value to someone who just wants to listen to and organize music.
Con The mobile app is known to crash from time to time
Con Buggy iTunes app
Immediately after the launch of Apple Music worldwide with the release of the iTunes 12.2, once users upgrade to the latest version of iTunes, many users experienced issues with music list being mixed up, wrong metadata etc.
Con Some albums have missing tracks / artists have missing albums
Due to copyright issues some albums on the service have tracks missing or some artists on the service have albums missing, which begs the question, why list the album if it is not complete.
Con Mediocre algorithms
Apple Music's algorithms are not very helpful if you are trying to find more music.
Con Poor UI
Con Doesn't pay artists a fair price
As of march 2018, Apple Music paid the artists $0.0074 per count. That's better than Spotify ($0.0044) and slightly more than Google Play ($0.0068) but way less than Tidal ($0.0125) or Napster ($0.019).
Con It changes the default artwork of your music
Con Confusing onboarding process
Con Apple Music has in some situations deleted user's local files
Con Requires an Apple device
Apple products are expensive as hell, and you can't use Apple music without one or iTunes.