by Noah Pond

The age old debate: Lebron or Jordan, gay son or thot daughter, Apple Music or Spotify? These are questions our ancestors spent millennia trying to figure out, but I am here today to give you an answer. 

It’s Apple Music and it always has been. It’s just better; it’s simple and easy to navigate while having better sound quality than its competitors. 

My homies will hand me their phones and be like, ‘queue a song.’ I look down and can’t tell what it is I’m looking at — or even where the search bar is. Why is there a search bar on every page and why are there so many damn words? I am becoming overwhelmed. And why do you keep showing me your AI curated playlist titled Gym Milk Biotic Slay. Like WTF is that? Apple Music is so tasteful, with playlist names like For you or Favorites Mix — they tell you everything you need to know. 

Looking at the two apps side-by-side, they are pretty similar. But, morally, one may be better than the other. Last year, Spotify donated $150,000 to Trump’s inauguration day which they wrote off by saying they would have done that for either political party. Then, more recently in June, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek announced that he’d led a funding round of nearly $700 million for a European defense firm Helsing according to the LA Times. That money went straight to AI integrated fighter drones.

Then there’s always the argument for all the artists who pulled their work from Spotify because they don’t align with their views. I’m talkin’ artists like Neil Young who removed his work during covid and more recently Deerhoof, Fontaines D.C. and King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. You’re telling me you’d rather support the military industrial complex and listen to Joe Rogan than listen to Harvest Moon guilt free? 

Apple Music is better, and it sounds better too. Up until recently, Spotify users could only get “very high” as an audio quality setting which is approximately 320kbit/s. On the other hand, basically every single song on Apple Music is available for lossless streaming, which is an uncompressed format very similar to a CD. But Dolby Atmos is really the crown jewel. It is hi-res lossless, which delivers an even better sound quality than CDs.

Next time you throw on your headphones to bump your silly AI playlists, remember you could just donate some money to Trump and the military industrial complex directly instead of having your low quality tunes do the dirty work for you. 

Noah Pond is a senior at Cal Poly Humboldt and the layout editor of the Lumberjack. He doesn’t write as much as he used to so enjoy it when he does.