There is a fundamental difference between Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube Music.

There is a fundamental difference between Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube Music, a distinction that is not often highlighted and that can annoy you every day. Explanation.

There are now many music streaming services to choose from, and at first glance, they all seem very similar – tens of millions of songs, mobile and desktop apps, the ability to play offline, and all that. It’s not always easy to know their differences, in this article we’re going to highlight some pretty important of the major services on the market.

Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube Music are very popular and they all have a large catalog and many useful features. However, the way playback works on Spotify is fundamentally different from Apple Music and YouTube Music. And if you’ve only used one of them, you may not know.

Play Music on Spotify

You can play Spotify playlists on a range of different devices: smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, laptops, smart speakers, car audio systems, TVs, and more. There’s even a web player as well as desktop apps. You are spoiled for choice for Windows and macOS. Most features also exist on all platforms.

That being said, despite all these features, you can only play one playlist at a time. Open a playlist on your Windows computer and it will appear on your Android smartphone. A playlist change on one device reflects that change everywhere.

You can even control playback on one device from another via Spotify Connect: start listening on your Mac and you can, for example, stop and resume playback from your iPhone. It works great in certain situations, in particular when you leave your house to go to your car.

But this mode of operation is not suitable if you want to have one playlist in the kitchen and another in the office. Admittedly, playlists are a few clicks away, but Spotify doesn’t remember where you left off. It’s not as convenient as having two playlists on two different devices at the same time.

You can get around this: you can take the device offline and use the available songs, this will activate a separate listening that does not sync everything, but then you have no connection at all on this device. You can also set up a family account to have separate profiles and special listening activities. But through a single account, listening is synced across all devices, for better or worse.

Playing Music in Apple Music and YouTube Music

Like Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube Music are available on many devices – Apple even has an Apple Music app for Android.

The fundamental difference between the two services and Spotify is that listening remains separate on each of your devices. You can listen to something on your Mac like something else on your iPhone. Or even multiple tabs with different songs or playlists open at the same time.

This works really well if you’re used to juggling your music. If you are constantly switching between French chanson and heavy metal, you can open each playlist in a separate tab. And your position in the playlists remains in memory.

This system is less effective if you frequently switch from one device to another or from one room to another. Playback is not automatically synced like it is with Spotify. There are other options for this, such as AirPlay or the Chromecast protocol, but if you open the app on your phone, you won’t see where you were on your computer a few seconds ago.

These are two very different approaches to reading music itself, and everyone has their own preferences. However, this is an aspect that these services don’t often stand out when comparing them. This suggests that they are not as similar and interchangeable as one might think.