The Best Music Streaming Services to Get Your Groove On
Music streaming services used to be largely defined by their song libraries. For example, Taylor Swift might have been on Apple Music but not on Spotify, and Tidal was originally weighted toward hip hop. Nowadays, these services have similar catalogs, offering millions of songs and playlists, and they generally all release new albums at the same time. You shouldn't have much trouble finding your favorite artist on any of them.
What separates them 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. 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 July 2021: We reordered our picks with new features, and we also added slides explaining lossless audio format and how to figure out your needs. We've added information on Amazon Music rolling its premium HD tier into the Unlimited tier, as well.
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How to Choose a Service
Figuring Out Your NeedsWhen 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 only 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 at 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.
- Photograph: Spotify via Matt Jancer
Best Overall
SpotifySpotify 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. Considering it's free, that's passable. For $10 a month, the Premium tier ditches ads entirely and streams up to 320 Kbps, which is the standard streaming quality these days. Better yet, a Spotify Hi-Fi tier is coming later this year if you want lossless audio quality.
Spotify's previous 10,000-song library limit is gone. You now can 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 where a group simultaneously streams a playlist.
Downsides? The Artists sidebar takes you to an artist's page where all the songs you like and don't like are commingled. Most of the time, I want to put a single artist on shuffle and hear only the songs I like, and I can't do that. It's a weakness shared with most other apps. Don't forget to check out senior writer Lauren Goode's Tips for Getting the Most Out of Spotify.
- Apple Music via Matt Jancer
The Audiophile Pick
Apple MusicApple Music is our new audiophile pick, thanks to lossless music quality now being included in its base $10-a-month tier, which is half the cost of Tidal's lossless tier. About 20 million tracks are now available in lossless format, but Apple says its entire catalog of 70 million-plus will be available in lossless by the end of the year. Some tracks will also be 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's more human-curated discovery options aren't as fun as Spotify's. Like on Spotify, you can see what your friends are listening to if they've turned on social sharing. But unlike Spotify, there's a tab showing all your favorited songs, artist by artist, so if you want to listen to AC/DC on your drive home, it'll play all the AC/DC songs you've liked across all their albums. 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.
- Tidal via Matt Jancer
For the Apple-Hating Audiophile
TidalTidal was the previous audiophile choice with its enormous lossless-quality song library, but it costs $20 per month as compared to Apple's new $10 Hi-Fi offering. It 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.
Tidal's catalog of more than 70 million songs 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, unlike Apple Music, which is phasing its entire library in gradually over 2021. So if you can't wait—or if the price on the AirPods Max makes your neck itch—Tidal still has its place. There are three pricing tiers. Tidal Access is free and lets you play curated channels, but you can't search for music or skip songs. The Premium tier is $10 a month and plays audio at up to 320 Kbps.
- YouTube Music via Matt Jancer
Surprisingly Good on Desktop
YouTube MusicYouTube Music's interface is slick and well laid out. It doesn't try to copy Spotify's look, a smart move for an underdog music platform (from a billion-dollar company). 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).
The service has more than 60 million songs in its catalog, and its suggestions for bands I might like are pretty good. 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, it's worth paying for YouTube Premium instead for $12 a month. It gets rid of ads on YouTube and offers up unlimited access to YouTube Music Premium.
Deezer via Matt JancerOther Services
These Aren't So GreatWondering 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 75 million tracks, but certain artists and albums are off-limits unless you pay extra for Amazon Music Unlimited—$8 per month for Prime members and $10 per month for everyone else. Amazon Music HD no longer requires an extra monthly fee on top of Unlimited's price tag. Its complete library of now-lossless audio is included in Unlimited. That makes Amazon Music a much better deal than it used to be, but its clunky interface and so-so music discovery hold it back from being a top pick.
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. 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 are missing, for example. It also had a dismal Back button that would skip screens, like Apple Music.
Pandora: Pandora is still very popular, but it has steadily lost listeners since 2014. 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 choose 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.
What Is Lossless or Spatial Audio?
Making Sense of Top-Tier Audio QualityLossless audio quality is the new holy grail marketing term for music streaming apps in 2021, 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 live 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 that 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 it.
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