While the cool kids and audiophiles are creating a vinyl resurgence and arguing over the best turntables , streaming music is still the most convenient way to listen to your favorite songs. Streaming used to mean sacrificing sound quality, but that’s no longer the case — it may surprise you that streaming music can sound indistinguishable from, or even better than, an old-fashioned CD . The question is, which streaming music service is best for you? We checked out Spotify , Apple Music , Tidal , Amazon Music , YouTube Music , Deezer, Qobuz and Pandora Premium to see how each platform stacks up for your subscription buck. While most offer music catalogs of more than 50 million songs, each has its own unique pros and cons. We’ve also left out services that only play music in a radio format and don’t offer a la carte listening that lets you choose your own songs. Services typically charge $10 a month and don’t have a contract, but swapping between them isn’t as straightforward as TV streaming . If you don’t want to rebuild your library and playlists from scratch if you switch, you have two main options — a music locker service such as YouTube Music, or the library import tool Soundiiz . The latter option can read the library from each of your music services and transfer them, and while there is a $4.50 monthly charge you can always cancel once you’ve converted your library. So which music streaming services offer the best combination of price, library size and sound quality? Read on to find an in-depth look at each of the services and a feature comparison, along with a full price breakdown in the chart at the bottom of the page. And if you want the TL;DR, these are the top three. Spotify is the pioneer in music streaming and arguably the best-known service. It offers a number of curated music discovery services, including its Discover Weekly playlist, and is constantly implementing new ones, such as Stations. It’s also ramping up its non-music content with a push towards podcasts . It’s a close race between Spotify Premium and Apple Music, but Spotify wins as the best music streaming service overall thanks to a fun, easy-to-use interface, an extensive catalog and the best device compatibility. Spotify also offers our favorite free tier: Without paying a dime or providing a credit card number, you can still stream Spotify Connect to numerous Wi-Fi devices. While Spotify recently announced a new HiFi tier it appears to be capped at CD quality unlike similar options from Tidal or Qobuz. It also hiked prices on Family plans in the US and other plans in the US and Europe, but the base price remains $10 per month in the US. The Good The Bad Best for: People who want a solid all-around service, and especially for people who love to make, browse and share playlists for any scenario. Read our Spotify review . Read more: Apple Music vs. Spotify: The best music streaming service for you Apple Music is a close second to Spotify, and it’s the only one of our top three with a digital locker to store your own library of songs — YouTube Music, below, is the other music locker option. There are two ways to upload your music: free with a Music subscription, but with DRM ; or $25, £22 or AU$35 a year for iTunes match which will let you download again even without a Music subscription. Not surprisingly, Apple Music is an excellent choice if you’ve invested heavily in Apple devices. If you own an Apple HomePod or Mini , it is the default subscription service to summon music with your voice. Apple Music also makes the ideal companion for an iPod Touch , which, amazingly, is still a thing. There’s also ton of curated playlists, many handcrafted by musicians and tastemakers, but it lacks the robust sharing options built into Spotify. The Good The Bad Best for: Those who want to listen to albums and songs they’ve added to iTunes or use an Apple HomePod device. Read our Apple Music review . Read more: Best noise-canceling headphones of 2021 In third place is Tidal, which offers a wide selection of music beyond its seemingly urban focus. Its higher-priced options are especially suited to people seeking the best audio quality. While Qobuz promises arguably better sound quality (no MQA decoder required) both its subscriber base and catalog are dwarfed by Tidal’s. Now partly owned by Jack Dorsey’s Square , Tidal offers lossless audio streaming with sound quality that is virtually identical to — or better than — CD. Tidal says its catalog exceeds 70 million tracks, and now includes longtime holdouts Metallica as well. If you’re an audiophile, a fan of urban music, or a mix of both, then Tidal should appeal to you. The Good The Bad Best for: Musically inclined purists who care deeply about sound quality and discovering new, up-and-coming artists. Read more . Amazon Music Unlimited is the “grownup” (a.k.a. paid) version of Amazon Prime Music , which any Prime subscriber gets for “free.” It offers a greatly expanded catalog for an extra outlay per month: $8 for Prime members and $10 if you don’t have Prime. Rather than focusing on the cutting edge of music as some others here do, the Amazon music service features recommended playlists and radio stations that are grouped around artists you’ve already listened to. The Good The Bad Best for: Amazon Prime members who want to save a few bucks on a decent music catalog YouTube Music is the successor to Google Play Music , and if you sign up for the ad-free YouTube Premium you get YouTube Music thrown in for free. The good news is that YouTube Music is a mostly impressive service, and Google has retained the predecessor’s music locker system. If you have a legacy Google Play Music account you may be able to still transfer your library over to YouTube Music. And it’s not just legacy content: YouTube Music allows users to upload new tracks to its online music locker, too. In even better news, YouTube Music offers a cleaner interface than Google Play Music. Instead of playlists, YouTube Music offers well-curated radio stations, which are the standout features. Unlike playlists, which are finite and contain specific tracks, radio stations play endlessly and are updated often. The Good The Bad Best for: Heavy YouTube users and Android device users. One of the most popular streaming radio services in the US, Pandora also offers the a la carte Premium ($10 a month) and no-ads Plus ($5 a month). The result is more flexibility than most competitors, and Premium has gained plenty more subscribers in recent years, even if the service is behind in terms of overall catalog size. The Good The Bad Best for: Pandora Premium is of most interest to people who already use Pandora and want to be able to pick exactly what they listen to. We’d recommend it to almost no one else. Qobuz launched in the US in February 2019 with a clean interface, hi-res audio streams (which unlike Tidal’s don’t need an MQA decoder) and the ability to buy lossless music. It offers two plans — the hi-res Studio Premier for $15 a month and the $249 annual Sublime Plus, which offers discounts on the store. At 50 million tracks, Qobuz’s streaming catalog isn’t quite at the level of Tidal or Spotify, but it should be sufficient for everything but the more obscure artists. The Good The Bad Best for: Audiophiles who want hi-res music for a decent price plus the ability to buy and download albums French stalwart Deezer has been operating in the States since 2016, and it has a lot to offer, including a free tier (mobile only) and 56 million tracks. It has more than subscribers than some others on this list thanks, in part, to its previous affiliation with Cricket Wireless. The main Premium plan is $10 a month but users are also able to upgrade to a lossless version (CD quality) for $15 a month. While it reportedly boasts more users than Tidal, the service doesn’t offer enough to differentiate it from its similarly priced competitors. The ’60s are alive and well on my Spotify app. This guide covers on-demand music streaming services, and for that reason, we’ve purposely left out services that only play music in a radio format. Until recently this list excluded Pandora, but now that the company also offers a Premium tier we’ve included it here. Slacker Radio , TuneIn and iHeartRadio are other radio-style services that play music stations based around a theme or artist, without you explicitly picking tracks. Amazon was one of the first services to offer uploading your MP3 collection into the cloud, but this was officially discontinued in 2018 . Meanwhile, the Apple and Google services listed either allow you to combine your personal music collection with the streaming catalog, though tagging and organization can be a time-consuming challenge (your myriad live Phish tracks won’t organize themselves). Still, if you’ve invested money in digital music over the years, those two services offer a patch to continue enjoying that music online. The number of songs offered by a music service used to be one of the main differentiators, but most now have between 50 million and 70 million songs or more. However, depending on your favored genre, some of them have a more robust catalog that include many under-the-radar, indie or hip-hop artists. If you’re musically inclined, constantly on the hunt for your favorite new band, a streaming service like Spotify or Tidal may be more up your alley. Users who are less ambitious about expanding their musical taste will be satisfied with the smaller catalogs Amazon Music Unlimited or Pandora offer. Apple Music is somewhere in the middle, offering a healthy mix of mainstream tunes and underground unknowns.
