THE SONG LIBRARY OF MUSIC STREAMING SERVICES USED TO BE LARGELY DEFINED BY THEM. Taylor Swift, for example, may have been on Apple Music but not on Spotify, and Tidal was designed with hip hop in mind. You should be able to find your favourite musician on any of them.
What divides them now is the quality of music discovery—whether it’s based on algorithms or human curation—as well as the user experience on desktop and mobile apps, the devices with which they can be used, and the sound quality. Most of them have free levels, but if you enrol and pay a monthly price, the experience increases. We put them all to the test, and these are the ones who came out on top. Check out our other shopping guides, such as the Best Wireless Headphones and the Best Bluetooth Headphones.
In July 2021, the following information was updated: We added slides discussing lossless audio format and how to determine your needs, as well as reordering our recommendations with additional features. We’ve also included details about Amazon Music’s premium HD tier being rolled into the Unlimited tier.
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Apple Music
Because lossless music quality is now included in Apple Music’s main $10-per-month tier, which is half the price of Tidal’s lossless tier, Apple Music is our new audiophile selection. Apple said its entire collection of 70 million or more songs will be available in lossless format by the end of the year. Dolby Atmos will be accessible for some of the tracks.
Apple Music’s lossy format broadcasts songs at up to 256 Kbps, which is similar to Spotify’s 320 Kbps. Apple’s discovery options, which are more human-curated, aren’t as entertaining as Spotify’s. If your friends have enabled social sharing, you can see what they’re listening to just like Spotify. However, unlike Spotify, there is a tab that lists all of your favorited songs by artist, so if you want to listen to AC/DC on your way home, it will play all of the AC/DC songs you’ve loved.
The iPhone app is great, and the Android version is decent, but the desktop app is terrible. Songs will sometimes refuse to play, selecting “Add to Library” will only sporadically work, and the Back button is a broken mess. It’s time consuming to add music to your library. The Back button returns you to the home screen if you move away from the browsing tab, so you’ll have to navigate all the way back to the album or artist you were looking at—except when it mysteriously vanishes.
Spotify
Spotify boasts the most advanced music finding algorithms as well as the slickest, most responsive user interface. Based on what I’ve already enjoyed and listened to on the app, it lead me down rabbit holes to locate new artists and old favourites.
The free tier has a low-quality 96-Kbps streaming bit rate by default, but you can upgrade to 160 Kbps. That’s OK considering it’s free. The Premium tier, which costs $10 a month, removes all ads and allows you to stream at 320 Kbps, which is the current norm. If you desire lossless audio quality, there will be a Spotify Hi-Fi tier later this year.
The prior limit of 10,000 songs in Spotify’s catalogue has been lifted. You can now add an unlimited amount of songs to your personal library, with each playlist containing a maximum of 10,000 songs. You may view what your friends have been listening to and arrange sessions when a group plays a playlist at the same time if you enable social sharing.
Downsides? The Artists sidebar sends you to an artist’s page, where all of your favourite and least favourite tracks are mixed together. I usually want to put a single artist on shuffle and listen to only the songs I like, but I can’t. It’s a flaw that most other apps have as well. Check out senior writer Lauren Goode’s Spotify Tips for Getting the Most Out of It.
