Biz & IT
The Best Music Streaming Services to Get Your Groove On
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gear
Mar 2021
Music sure has come a long way since people were loading up Napster and Limewire to, hah, "legally" download "backups" of their favorite tracks. Never before have we had such choice for so little cash. For the price of a monthly Taco Bell lunch, we can ensure we have quality recordings unaccompanied by shifty viruses, and without needing to clear storage space on our devices or wait for lengthy downloads. There are lots of choices for how to stream music these days, but not all of them are worth your fistful of dollars.
The things that separate streaming services today are the quality of music discovery--whether it's based on algorithms or human curation--the user experience on desktop and mobile apps, what devices you can use them with, and their sound quality. All these services' libraries pretty much mirror each other, with tens of millions of songs both popular and obscure. Most of them have free tiers, but the experience improves if you subscribe and pay a monthly fee. We put 'em all to the test, and these are our favorites. Be sure to check out our many other buying guides, including the Best Wireless Headphones, Best Wirefree Earbuds, and Best Cheap Headphones.
Updated May 2023: We've updated song catalog counts and descriptions.
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When it comes to listening to music, you can always upgrade your headphones or speaker system. However, most people pick a streaming service and stick with it for years and years. So how do you know if you're getting the right one--not just the "best" one, but the one that's right for you? Here are some factors to consider.
You may enjoy music more when you can share the experience with friends. If all those friends use Spotify, sharing the same platform will make it much easier. Tyler Hayes has tips for each service: How to Make Your Music Streaming More Social.
If you listen to live recordings alone, in a quiet room, with a great pair of wired headphones, then you'll probably want to splurge on lossless audio. (I'll explain lossless audio at the end of this article.) However, if you listen to music while running, with workout headphones or on a Bluetooth speaker, you probably won't be able to tell the difference. Lossless formats also require four or five times as much storage space per song.
The devices or phone you own could also affect your ease of use. If you're planning to splurge on an Apple Music subscription with Dolby Atmos and lossless audio, you will need a pair of Apple-made headphones (to go with your iPhone and HomePod Mini). If, however, all your speakers are smart Alexa-enabled speakers, you might want to consider Amazon Music, even if it's not one of our top personal picks.
Spotify has the best music discovery algorithms and the slickest, snappiest user interface. It led me down rabbit holes to find new artists and old favorites, based on what I've already liked and listened to on the app.
The free tier, with advertisements, defaults to a low-quality 96-Kbps streaming bit rate, but you can bump it up to 160 Kbps. For $10 a month, the Premium tier ditches ads entirely and streams up to 320 Kbps, which is the standard streaming quality these days. If you're looking for lossless, a Spotify HiFi tier is on its way, according to the company, but there's still no launch date, even two years after it was announced.
There are now more than 100 million tracks on Spotify. That is minus the catalogs of Neil Young, (some of) Joni Mitchell, and others who requested that Spotify remove their songs last year in protest of Spotify podcaster Joe Rogan's chronic spreading of Covid misinformation.
Spotify lets you add an unlimited number of songs to your personal library, as well, and you can put up to 10,000 in each playlist. If you turn on social sharing, you can see what your friends have been listening to and create sessions where a group simultaneously streams a playlist. There's an option on each Artist page to listen to only the songs of theirs you've liked, which is a very welcome change from previous years.
Spotify's combined albums, compilations, and singles into one location--with an option to separate them--is much smoother and more convenient than the old way of forcing you to view them all separately, all the time. Playlists and albums get their own shuffle buttons, which is a nice touch that lets you know when you're on shuffle and when you're listening to everything in order.
Senior writer Lauren Goode also has more tips for getting the most out of Spotify.
Tidal and Apple Music have been trading places in our guide for Best Audiophile Pick for a while now. Last year, Tidal responded to Apple Music's lossless-quality tier by upping Premium (now known as the HiFi tier) from 320 kbps to 1411 kbps streaming quality, which is even with Apple Music's lossless tier. Now the differences are razor-thin.
Tidal HiFi Plus supports Dolby Atmos Music and 360 Reality Audio, and there are even tracks you can play at "Master" quality (up to 9,216 Kbps)--though they're few and far between. Newly introduced for the HiFi Plus tier is something Tidal calls Direct Artist Payouts. Basically, "up to" 10 percent of your subscription fee is delivered to the artists you listen to most. It's a very thoughtful addition, and if you care about the state of the music industry (and the effect streaming has had on it), the knowledge that you're supporting your favorite bands and artists could be enough to swing you toward Tidal. But details about how much is contributed and to whom are still murky.
The $10-per-month Premium tier has been renamed the HiFi tier, and its audio quality has been upped from 320 kbps to 1411 kbps. There's also Tidal Free. In case you're wondering: It's free because it comes with ad interruptions. On Free you can play curated channels, but you can't watch videos, and the streaming quality is limited to 160 kbps.
Tidal's catalog now includes more than 100 million songs, a boost from when we last updated this article in September 2022. The selection draws from the same broad swathe of genres as its competition, and it no longer leans primarily on hip-hop tracks, as it once did. All its songs are available currently in lossless format.
Apple Music was our audiophile pick until Tidal knocked it off the pedestal, but it's still a very solid choice for lossless quality at $10 a month, if you're an Apple fan. For select songs, audio streams at 1411 kbps. Apple has boosted its song catalog to over 100 million songs, all of which are available in lossless format. Some tracks are also available in Dolby Atmos. Apple Music's regular, lossy format streams songs at up to 256 Kbps, which isn't noticeably different from Spotify's 320 Kbps.
Apple Music Voice Plan costs $5 a month. There are no annoying ads, but you have to use Siri to control it. There's no way to view or make playlists, and you can't save favorite songs, artists, or albums. That also means no music videos or lyrics. There's little you can control with the tap of a finger: pause/play, forward, and back. You're stuck asking Siri to find and play songs one at a time, or you can listen to curated playlists and radio stations. But that's a lot of restrictions to save only $5 a month. If it sounds a little confusing or counterintuitive, Apple has put together a (necessary) how-to.
Apple's human-curated discovery options aren't as fun as Spotify's. As on Spotify, you can see what your friends are listening to if they've turned on social sharing. You're limited to 100,000 songs in your library, but there are no limits to how many you can put in each playlist.
I like the iPhone app, and the Android version is OK, but the desktop app is dreadful. Songs occasionally refuse to play, clicking "Add to Library" rarely works, and the Back button is a dysfunctional mess. Adding music to your library is tedious. If you navigate away from the browsing tab, the Back button takes you to the home screen, so you have to navigate all the way back to the album or artist you were looking at--except for when it nonsensically disappears. If you're considering making the move, check out our guide to switching from Spotify to Apple Music.
YouTube Music's interface is slick and well laid out. It doesn't try to copy Spotify's look, and I like how the song queue and lyrics pop up in a vertical window within the app, which makes navigating quicker and easier. You can also easily switch from listening to a song to watching the music video, if one is available.
YouTube used to offer music recommendations based on you sharing your precise location, which could be creepy. That's gone in the latest updates to YouTube Music, although you can still choose to see popular song recommendations based on your approximate location.
The service has more than 100 million songs in its catalog, and I liked its band suggestions. You can keep 100,000 songs saved in your library, and you can create and share playlists with your buddies. YouTube Music combines Apple Music's and Spotify's best artist-tracking features: You can see your "liked" songs by artist, and you can subscribe to an artist to see their entire catalog and new releases.
The free tier has a major downside--on the smartphone app, the music stops playing when you turn your screen off or jump to another app. That means you'll probably need to pony up for YouTube Music Premium ($10 a month), which also cuts out the ads and lets you download songs for offline playback. The desktop app doesn't have the same critical weakness.
Note: If you watch a lot of YouTube, consider YouTube Premium instead for $12 a month. It gets rid of ads on YouTube and offers unlimited access to YouTube Music Premium.
Wondering about other streaming services? I tried the following three and didn't like them as much as our top picks. Here's why:
Amazon Music: The best thing about Amazon Music is that its basic ad-free tier is included with Prime, but it's sneaky. It has a song catalog of more than 100 million tracks, up from "more than 90 million" this past fall, but listeners recently lost the ability to choose what to hear and when. Instead, they're stuck on shuffle. There's Amazon Music Unlimited--$9 per month for Prime members and $10 per month for everyone else--ditches the ads, and Amazon Music HD no longer requires an extra monthly fee on top of Unlimited's price tag, but its clunky interface and so-so music discovery hold it back from being a top pick.
Amazon Music:Deezer: This international audio streaming service has made multiple inroads to compete with Spotify, but we found its features lacking. On iPhone and Android, you can only "favorite" 1,000 albums and artists, each. That's way too low, especially considering its 90-million-song catalog. Music discovery suggestions are pretty bad too. Since it's a French streaming service, a lot of the curated playlists include tracks from albums that you can't play in the US. Several tracks in the Ray Charles collections were missing when I checked, for example. It also had a dismal Back button that would skip screens.
Deezer:Pandora: Once the king of music streaming, Pandora is still very popular, but it has steadily lost listeners over the last decade. The free tier is full of ads. There's a visual ad in the app window, ads periodically interrupt your listening on the curated radio stations, you need to watch ads to skip tracks, and you need to watch ads to search for and play specific songs. Paying $5 a month gets rid of them, except you still have to watch ads to search for your own tracks. The $10-a-month Premium tier lets you search for songs without ads, but like the other tiers it promises unlimited skips but has fine print saying that "skips (are) limited by certain licensing restrictions." The maximum bit rate of 192 Kbps is too low to be worth paying for. It's a bad deal all around. Pandora is simply falling further and further behind.
Pandora:
Lossless audio quality is the big, new marketing buzzword for music streaming apps, kind of like the megapixel wars of digital SLR cameras in the 2000s. Most popular music services use a form of lossy compression, which encodes music files and discards less distinguishable bits of data in the song, so that files take up far less storage space.
Lossless compression, by comparison, keeps every bit of data, so you won't miss a single nuance from that recording. A lossless music file generally streams at 1,411 Kbps, compared to a more typical lossy file that generally streams from around 256 Kbps to 320 Kbps.
You may also see the term "spatial audio," which is a feature Apple Music recently added. Spatial audio uses Dolby Atmos technology to allow artists to mix music so that you hear the sound from around you and above, for a much more immersive quality. However, you will need Apple-made headphones with an H1 or W1 chip to enjoy Apple Music's lossless tracks.
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