You can find new music on the Apple Music Discovery Station, which gives you a tailored playlist to suggest new artists and jams you’ve never heard before but should like based on your personal musical tastes.

Personalized recommendations have long been a reason people cite for sticking with Spotify over Apple Music. Now, you can add the Discovery Station to my list of eight reasons you should make the switch. Apple Music offers personalized music picks, too, and the system works great.

I’ll show you where to find Apple Music’s Discovery Station and how to make the most of it.

This week on Cult of Mac’s podcast: Not all iPhone rumors prove exciting. In fact, a big one this week — possible iPhone 15 price hikes — sounds downright depressing. But it’s not all bad news. The “normie” iPhone 15 might get some trickle-down camera tech that could make it easier not to go Pro this year.

Also on The CultCast:

• Think of all the interesting ways you could use an Action button like on Apple Watch Ultra’s on an iPhone. Well, the iPhone 15 Pro might get in on that action.
• Apple’s Vision Pro loaners for developers come with some absolutely ridiculous restrictions.
• We’ve got an Apple Watch tip that we bet you don’t know — how to get the time with a tap on your wrist. Perfect for those long, boring meetings when you don’t want to peek at your watch.
• Hang around for the great Apple Music versus Spotify debate of 2023.

Listen to this week’s episode of The CultCast in the Podcasts app or your favorite podcast app. (Be sure to subscribe and leave us a review if you like it!) Or watch the video live stream, embedded below.

The streaming music service Spotify just increased its prices across the board. The costs of most subscription options are now the same as the prices of its arch rival, Apple Music.

These increases are occurring in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and many other countries around the globe.

Apple Music is in a distant second place to Spotify in paying subscribers, but in my opinion, Apple Music is the better service. It has more advanced features like live lyrics, karaoke, lossless and spatial audio.

And for music aficionados, you can upload your own ripped recordings and MP3s. You have full control over your music library. The Apple Music Classical app gives you a first-class experience learning and discovering classical music.

Here are the eight things keeping me on Apple Music — and why you should switch away from Spotify.

All Spotify subscribers who’ve been paying for the music streaming service through the App Store are being switched to a free, ad-supported plan whether they want to or not.

Those who wish can switch back to a for-pay plan, but can not pay for it through Apple’s app payment system.

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Spotify is offering a three-month free trial to new subscribers for a limited time. The music streaming service typically has a one-month trial period.

If you are a former Spotify Premium user, you can resubscribe by paying just $9.99 for three months.

Apple on Wednesday confirmed a significant change to its App Store policy that finally allows “reader” apps like Netflix and Spotify to link to their own websites for things like creating and managing accounts.

Until now, including an external link for this kind of purpose was prohibited, and would have resulted in App Store expulsion. That meant a poor user experience for a whole bunch of popular services on iPhone and iPad.

That’s finally changing, but of course, Apple plans to make it as complicated as possible for developers to enjoy it.

Cue the lights, strike up the music and let the garden party begin. Ikea’s got a new outdoor lantern coming. What’s interesting is that it doubles as the first Bluetooth speaker on the market with Spotify Tap built in.

The one-touch Spotify functionality isn’t the only music streaming service you can use with the lamp, called the Ikea Vappeby. But it’s handy.

Google on Thursday confirmed that it will give “a small number of participating developers” the ability to implement third-party payment methods in their Android apps as part of a pilot program called User Choice Billing.

Spotify, first to take advantage of the change, will offer Google Play’s billing system as well as its own. The move puts even more pressure on Apple, which has been fighting hard to block third-party payment systems on iOS.