Spotify or Soundcloud - Guitarwaze Investigates

If you're into music, chances are you're using some sort of song streaming library. While there are a few out there, such as Apple Music, Pandora, Amazon Music Unlimited and Tidal we've chosen to focus on Spotify and Soundcloud. They are the most popular and come with advantages and disadvantages, depending on the needs of the user.

The question whether Spotify or Soundcloud is better has occupied our minds and some of us Guitarwazers have had the odd debate over it. Therefore we've done some digging and thought we'd share our findings.

Spotify

Spotify is the most popular music streaming platform out there with arguably the largest music library of all its competitors, with over 20 million songs. It will give you genres and moods and offers unmatched service in terms of curated song suggestions based on your previous choices. With a paid subscription you get the offline listening option, where you can download your playlists, a seamless and intuitive process on Spotify. It'll give you all your favourites when you need to disconnect from the internet and connect with yourself and the natural world once in a while (a subtle hint...do it!). One really big plus on Spotify is the sound quality. You won't notice a difference with casual listening but the fact is that Spotify offers higher kbps sound quality than Soundcloud. Spotify also offers a really great interface and user experience making it easy to navigate and visually brilliant.

Soundcloud

Soundcloud not only allows you access to an online music library but allows you to upload your own music, giving independent musicians a massive platform to get their music heard. This is one of the main features that distinguishes this platform from others.

Therefore, it doesn't just offer a huge amount of popular music but gives you a library of independent artists and unknown tunes and remixes. For this, Soundcloud is truly the master.

Considering it is the number 1 platform for independent musicians, we think it should step up its game and become a match to Spotify when it comes to sound quality and user experience.

Having said that, the free version is much more pleasant to use than the equivalent on Spotify because you'll get a lot less, and much shorter, advertising which can really cramp your style when you're in the middle of enjoying a specific musical vibe.

Conclusion:

Spotify is the leader for the general population of music lovers and Soundcloud delivers the undiscovered talents of the world to the masses.

Spotify offers better music quality, but for most people it won't massively affect their listening experience. You have a much larger song library but you won't get the chance to discover a vast ocean of amazing unknown artists, which you will on Soundcloud.

The conclusion is therefore, that one is not more favourable than the other, but that you really want to be using both.

And when you fall in love with songs on these platforms, you head over to Guitarwaze to learn how to play them. We are working on delivering you an ever growing library of tunes to learn on our brand new hi-tech motion capture software.