I tried out the free versions of both Amazon Music and Spotify to compare. Spotify won, though both were far from perfect.

Although it may seem minor, Spotify is clearly paying more attention to the design and user experience of its app. The app has bright colors, but nothing jarring or hard to look at. Everything fits together in a way that visually makes sense.

I really liked that there's one central search location to find songs and podcasts, instead of navigating between different apps like I usually do. The same aesthetic carries onto the search page, and using each tab is intuitive. Overall, Spotify is pleasant to use, and I like the layout.

There's no "play" button, only options to add to a playlist or listen to shuffled with other songs.

While Spotify cared about design and listening experience, Amazon seems to be going for making as many listening tiers as possible, at the expense of design. It has five tiers in total, ranging from free, ad-sponsored Amazon Music to the $14.99 a month Amazon Music HD.

I tested out the free version, which gave me access to playlists with ad breaks, and limited skips. For me, the experience was less intuitive as I figured out what tools were available to me in the app. The recommendations were also not particularly useful.

To use this free version of Amazon Music, I had to log out of my Amazon account, which has Prime, and create a new account. Prime subscribers get access to 2 million songs from Amazon's catalogue, which were automatically applied to my account at first.

If you're as lazy as I am, the allure of being able to tell Alexa to play a song on the Echo is undeniable. I can almost ignore all the minor annoyances of the app, from useless recommendations to a complicated design, just for the convenience of seamlessly connecting to my Echo.

Note that it is possible to stream Spotify on an Echo, but I preferred the ease of Amazon Music, which was already connected to my account.

Both Amazon and Spotify have ads, and limit the number of songs you can skip in a given time period. Neither were particularly more annoying than the other, although it was jarring and weird when Spotify ads tried to disguise themselves as songs.

Amazon's attempts to promote its paid streaming services were, however, more annoying and obtrusive. They seemed to pop up more than Spotify's.

I found parts of both Amazon Music and Spotify that I liked, but they were far from perfect. Maybe that's too much to ask from a service that is, after all, free. Spotify easily had a better design, plus it was better for finding songs I already liked or discovering new ones. I liked that it was easier to connect Amazon to my Echo, but that couldn't make up for all the other issues with Amazon's app.

Spotify is the winner, although I can't see relying on either service for regular music.