For the last year I have been hap­pi­ly using Spo­ti­fy to stream music through my stereo while on the move. Despite a few ear­li­er glitch­es I would say recent­ly the app has worked well. I have a Philips CMD310, now no longer avail­able via Hal­fords but quite a good piece of kit for use with an iPhone. With the stereo’s dock I can place my iPhone in place and lis­ten to all my favourite playlists. Even though the stereo dates back before the iPhone light­ning con­nec­tor, an adap­tor works well for my iPhone 5.

I am cur­rent­ly on con­tract with Three, hav­ing used sev­er­al net­works in the past, I found that Three and EE have the best cov­er­age out­side of urban areas which is good when on the road stream­ing music.

Of course, last week Apple released Apple Music in the UK via IOS 8.4. Obvi­ous­ly real­is­ing Spo­ti­fy were tak­ing a large share of Apple’s iTunes prof­its, they decid­ed to launch this to direct­ly com­pete.

Hav­ing been an Apple user for a fair few years now, I was expect­ing this soft­ware to real­ly impress, pos­si­bly tak­ing me away from Spo­ti­fy but sad­ly I have so far not been too impressed. For­tu­nate­ly Apple have offered a 3 month free tri­al to try and con­vert us, but sad­ly, after just a few days I find myself mov­ing back to Spo­ti­fy. As for the amount of music avail­able and the way the inter­face allows the user to select the music, I think they’ve done a good job but the two main things which have put me off is first­ly, the delay in start­ing any select­ed music but main­ly the fact that the app does not keep alive when docked so I can­not have a quick look to see what’s play­ing. On the whole, the music qual­i­ty seems to be about the same as Spo­ti­fy although I have noticed some tracks are par­tic­u­lar­ly poor on Apple Music. Being a lover of all types of music depend­ing on my mood, I’m not a par­tic­u­lar fan of this tay­lor­ing music to your tastes either.

I will wait to see if Apple role out any updates in the near future but I think I will be stick­ing with Spo­ti­fy for now, just because it suits the way I lis­ten to music the most, stream­ing on the road.