If you’re playing the home game, you will recall that we switched from Spotify to Apple Music as our household streaming music provider back in July.

Today we switched back.

Two reasons:

First, Apple Music isn’t supported with an app for Google Home, meaning that Olivia needs to “cast” from her Android phone to her bedroom Google Home to listen to music when she’s going to sleep. Which means she needs to take her phone to bed with her. Which has all sorts of distracting repercussions.

Second, I’d underestimated the degree to which the Spotify algorithm “gets me.” Throwing back to Apple Music meant returning to a music fingerprint that I had 5 or 6 years ago, and I’ve evolved since then. This would change with time, but I simply got tired of hearing the songs of 2015 Peter in my recommended stream.

Both of these are a case for better interoperability, and for migration paths from streaming service to streaming service. Music streaming should be more like email: it should work everywhere there’s a speaker, and I should be able to transfer my taste profile from service to service.

Until that happens, I’m rejoining regularly scheduled July 2021 musical fingerprint, already in progress.

(To Apple’s credit, it was very easy to downgrade from Apple One to the component services I want to keep–iCloud storage and Apple TV+, and to Spotify’s credit, everything was waiting back where I left it when I downgraded to a free plan).