Apple Music has been in fierce competition with Spotify since the launch of Cupertino's service. Aside from Spotify Wrapped (which Apple greatly improved their version in '22), there are few differences in services. It really comes down to personal taste and preference rather than which is 'better'. Because both are damn good.
Apple is looking to up its game with the rollout of its new Sing feature, which is essentially karaoke for your devices. The best part? It's included with an Apple Music subscription and all you need is a supported device. Here's more from Apple's Newsroom announcement.
Apple today announced Apple Music Sing, an exciting new feature that allows users to sing along to their favorite songs with adjustable vocals and real-time lyrics. Apple Music Sing offers multiple lyric views to help fans take the lead, perform duets, sing backup, and more — all integrated within Apple Music’s unparalleled lyrics experience.
Apple Music Sing includes:
- Adjustable vocals: Users now have control over a song’s vocal levels. They can sing with the original artist vocals, take the lead, or mix it up on millions of songs in the Apple Music catalog.
- Real-time lyrics: Users can sing along to their favorite songs with animated lyrics that dance to the rhythm of the vocals.
- Background vocals: Vocal lines sung simultaneously can animate independently from the main vocals to make it easier for users to follow.
Apple Newsroom
- Duet view: Multiple vocalists show on opposite sides of the screen to make duets or multi-singer tracks easy to sing along to.
What Apple conveniently omits from their announcement is the Apple TV requirement for Sing. In order to use it, you must have the latest Apple TV device from 2022. That's a big miss in my book, since the price of those devices makes it something you don't upgrade until you really need to. My personal Apple TV device has worked flawlessly for seven years and this is the first time I've ever had a compatibility problem with it. Given this is an Apple feature, the lack of compatibility is even more disappointing.
That aside, the Sing feature is a lot of fun. I tried it out shortly after launch and what I think it's doing is isolating the vocals of a song using the Spacial Audio / Dolby Atmos feature. By canceling out this part of the track, they simply tweaked their lyrics view to display like a karaoke machine, and boom: Sing is a new feature.
While I can't imagine this being something that blows up and brings in new people to Apple Music, I do think it's a nice party game. One thing I do wish it did was to allow you to record the Sing session. If Apple figured that part out, THEN they could have the makings of fun videos getting their due on TikTok and the like.