The way I see it is this. Apple Music exists because the major record labels were impatient with Spotify's ability to monetize their on-demand music subscription service, and they finally caved to Apple's request to do something they've probably wanted to do since they acquired LaLa. The Beats acquisition certainly played a big part in this.
So Apple Music is about making music subscription services mainstream, in the same way that Netflix made video steaming mainstream. I remember trying Spotify several years ago, and it was kind of a joke. The library was totally random. If you searched for a new release, you might find half the album, or some remix single version of the most popular song. But, it was free, so no one was complaining.
Today, the expectations are higher, and certainly the expectations placed on Apple are very high. Spotify didn't go from zero to 10M users in one day. In most ways, the Apple Music launch was a great success, because it only went down a couple times for less than a day at a time.
I'm not trying to make excuses for Apple Music. Spotify is much more established. And what Apple is trying to do is kind of complicated, maybe unnecessarily so. It's like every idea about digital music from the past 15 years rolled into one. Do I really need to sync my CD rips and iTunes purchases, and have a version of them accessible from the cloud, and have immediate access to every recording in the iTunes Store minus the tracks for which some random co-songwriter doesn't check his voicemail, and be able to store a local copy of those recordings? Well, the fact is that I do have CD rips and iTunes purchases, and I do like listening to things on demand, and on rare occasions I do like something enough to want to hear it very frequently for about two months. The whole system is kind of silly. But mostly, I blame the recording industry of all of that.
For me personally, the main reason to prefer Apple Music over Spotify is that I can get iTunes gift cards at a 15% to 20% discount on a regular basis, either through Costco or eBay. In the long run, subscription-based music steaming is going to be completely uniform, because there isn't any real way to differentiate individual services. The calculation goes like this. The average person buys approximately four albums per year right now. The cost of a subscription service is about the same was 10 or 12 albums per year. In the 90s, when the recording industry was at its peak, I remember going to Tower Records and buying 10 albums at a time. But for various reasons probably involving anti-trust laws, the big four record labels can't just get together and collaborate on a single digital distribution platform. So they need to work through third parties and leverage them against each other. It's a terrible industry in a lot of ways. But it's what we've got.
What I like about Apple is that they make almost $60B per quarter in revenue right now, while the entire recording industry pulls about $8B in revenue per year. Apple isn't in music for the profit. That is, they obviously can't pull more revenue from music streaming than the entire recording industry makes per year. They're in music because it's an essential part of their core identity. I don't think they're going to pull out. I don't think they're going to fold in the next 20 years. Music is an important part of how Apple expands into new markets, but it's not important directly to Apple's bottom line. Unlike Spotify, they're not dependent on a bunch of venture capitalists who are willing to pour tens of millions of dollars into a profitless company expecting a payoff at some point in the future that may or may not come.
I can easily understand why a seasoned Spotify user or an owner of many bootleg or rare, out-of-print recordings would ditch Apple Music right now. Apple Music is not as mature as Spotify, and music file tagging has always kind of sucked and will probably never get any more reliable. For someone who is really dissatisfied with Apple Music, it wouldn't hurt to abandon it and check back when we hear about a major bug fix or improvement. But I can get a 15% to 20% discount on iTunes gift cards, so I'm going to stick it out for a while.