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How to Choose a Service
Figuring Out Your Needs
Best Overall
Spotify
The Audiophile Pick
Tidal
For Apple Aficionados
Apple Music
Music sure has come a long way since people were loading up Napster and Limewire to, uh, “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 access 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 streaming music these days, but not all of them are worth your fistful of dollars.
The things that separate streaming services are the quality of music discovery—whether that’s based on algorithms or human curation—the experience on desktop and mobile apps, what devices you can use them with, and their sound quality. All of these services’ libraries pretty much mirror each other, with tens of millions of songs ranging from the popular to the 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 to bring you 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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How to Choose a Service
Figuring Out Your Needs
You can always upgrade your headphones or speaker system, but most people pick a streaming service and stick with it for years. So how do you know you’re getting the right one—not just the best one, but the one that’s best 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 in 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, 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, you favor Alexa-enabled speakers, you might want to consider Amazon Music, even if it’s not one of our top personal picks.
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Spotify via Matt Jancer
Best Overall
Spotify
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 that 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 to protest Spotify podcaster Joe Rogan’s chronic spreading of Covid misinformation.
Spotify lets you add an unlimited number of songs to your personal library, 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 wherein 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.
The way Spotify groups albums, compilations, and singles in one location—with an option to separate them—is much smoother and more convenient than the old setup, which forced you to view them all separately, all of 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.
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Tidal via Matt Jancer
The Audiophile Pick
Tidal
Tidal and Apple Music have been trading places in our guide to 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 of its songs are currently available in lossless format.
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Apple Music via Matt Jancer
For Apple Aficionados
Apple Music
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.
The 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—just 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.
