Picking a music streaming service used to feel like choosing a sports team. For example, Taylor Swift might have been on Apple Music but not on Spotify; Tidal was originally weighted toward hip-hop. These days, it’s more about the user interface than catalog choice. All these services’ libraries pretty much mirror each other, with tens of millions of songs both popular and obscure.
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. 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 September 2022: Tidal has (again) displaced Apple Music as our audiophile pick, due to audio quality upgrades. Amazon Music has also gone up in price, and several services have added tens of millions of songs to their catalogs since we lasted updated this article in February 2022.
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