The Apple Music Discovery Station is now available, but won’t kill Spotify all on its own.Phil Ninckinson / Digital Trends
There’s a crutch that tends to appear whenever Apple is written about, and it’s arisen yet again this week.Apple Musicnow has a “Discovery Station” that lives alongside your personalized station (that’s the one with your name). And that’s led some lazy headlines to declare that Apple Music finally has a feature “that could kill Spotify.”
Let’s be perfectly clear: The new Discovery Station will decidedly not lead Apple Music to killSpotify. Or anything else, for that matter.
It is, however, a welcome feature. Unlike the personalized station, which picks and chooses from your library, the Discovery Station does the obvious and works outward from there, presenting tracks that are in your wheelhouse. And it’s not bad, though as with any sort of algorithmic endeavor, there will be times that it’ll have you make a beeline for the skip button. (I’m really not into Nu Metal anywhere near as much as Apple thinks I am.)
The point here, though, is that recommendation engines are nothing new. And when it comes to a streaming music app, it really is table stakes. It’s something Apple Music should have had long ago and is a feature that absolutely has given Spotify a leg up.
It is not — or if we absolutely have to caveat things, it is very unlikely — to kill Spotify in any way, shape, or form. Getting someone to switch from one app to another requires the new app to be several times better than the one it’s replacing. Apple’s simply reaching parity in feature here — and that’s before you get to whether its Discovery Station is as good as Spotify’s offering, and the overall question ofwhether Spotify is better than Apple Music.
No, barring acquisition by an eccentric billionaire with dubious intent, don’t look for Apple to kill Spotify anytime soon. Or anyone else, for that matter. You may, however, continue to look for lazy headlines.
