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Welcome to our advisor of the most productive music streaming services. Twenty years ago, when CDs were the number one medium and musicians could still make a living promoting their records, the concept of having almost every single song recorded at their fingertips on their phone or with their high-end headphones emerged. It seemed like science fiction. Formation
Even when Spotify launched in 2008, few people predicted the sea change in music consumption that would follow. However, today’s best music streaming facilities make the idea of creating an MP3 collection seem decidedly from the Stone Age.
Each platform provides users with keys to a library of one million on-demand music, available for streaming on CD. And all of this can be accessed through mobile devices, tablets, computers, internet players, or an increasing number of internet devices. connected devices.
But with such a giant catalog of pleasures to pay attention to, the selection can be overwhelming, and we’re not just talking about which song to pay attention to next (check out our list of the most productive audiophile albums here). Which streaming service is right for you?We’ve implemented the rule for six of the most productive music streams to see how they compare. Read on to find out which one tops the charts.
Apple Music (sign up now) stands out for its library, seamless integration with Apple devices, curated playlists, and exclusive releases.
Spotify (sign up now) stands out for its personalized playlists, discovery algorithms, cross-platform compatibility, collaborative features, and an ad-supported free tier.
Tidal (register now) stands out for its high-fidelity sound quality, exclusive content, music library, artist-owned platform, and detailed editorial content for audiophiles and music enthusiasts.
Qobuz (register now) stands out for its high-resolution audio quality, extensive music library, in-depth editorial content, offline listening, and audiophile-level equipment.
YouTube Music Premium (sign up now) shines with its ad-free experience, offline listening, seamless integration with YouTube music videos, and exclusive remixes, covers, and more.
Amazon Music Unlimited (sign up now) impresses with its audio, Alexa integration, personalized recommendations, and exclusive content.
Deezer (sign up now) offers an extensive library of music, audio, personalized recommendations, an exclusive Flow feature, and free, easy listening.
Apple Music was introduced in 2015 and has temporarily become one of the pioneers of the streaming wars. For a base £4. 99, subscribers can access over a hundred million songs, over 30,000 playlists and a host of original and on-demand radio shows. Little more, Apple also offers spatial audio listening and offline access to your library.
Currently, subscribers can enjoy Apple Music for free for one month and can also get 6 months of Apple Music for free with select audio devices.
There’s no loose tier here: Apple Music costs £5. 99 for students, £10. 99 for a full individual profile, and £16. 99 for families.
Like its competitors, Apple Music offers a wide variety of playlists organized according to a specific mood, genre, or other unifying theme, as well as algorithmically generated playlists designed specifically for the user. Spotify’s discovery algorithm, however, Apple offers thousands of rarer tracks that simply can’t be discovered on Spotify and the like.
Spatial audio provides a more visible position for other compositional elements, but whether it’s worth it depends largely on how much you care about immersive audio. The sound also rarely differs much from the tracks combined in Sony’s Atmos rival, 360 Reality Audio. , available on Deezer and Tidal, so it’s not strictly exclusive to Apple Music.
If Spotify HiFi ends up costing more (if it ever does), we think many will flock to Apple Music without being too unhappy about it. For those who make the switch, Apple has built a very solid house for them to play with, especially if they have an existing iTunes library to integrate with.
Spotify, the first unlimited music streaming service, is still a must-have option for millions of listeners. Price-wise, it offers an ad-supported free tier (with some of the most annoying classified ads you’ll ever hear), which limits track skipping and doesn’t allow offline listening. However, there are still podcasts and audiobooks left on the loose.
The Premium edition removes ads, increases streaming quality to 320kbps, allows downloads for offline playback, and delivers superior quality to what you hear. It costs £11. 99 per month for an individual subscription, £5. 99 for students, £16. 99 for a Duo subscription (two accounts), and £19. 99 for a six-account family plan.
It’s easy to see why Spotify is so popular. The desktop app, mobile apps and internet player are smartly designed and easy to use. There is an extensive library of around 80 million songs and 4. 7 million podcasts (some estimates imply that more than 100,000 are uploaded every day on Spotify and other DSPs). Plus, the service’s recommendations and music discovery features are unbeatable.
The Discover Weekly personalized playlist turns out to have an uncanny sense of your tastes. Sure, it’s just a set of rules that build something beyond listening, but it turns out to be more fine-tuned than its competitors and provides less apparent but more applicable suggestions. The huge variety of themed playlists is great too, while Friday’s Release Radar helps you stay up to date with the latest tracks from your favorite artists.
It also seems to be at the forefront in terms of integration with the widest diversity of applications and services. It’s simple to share Spotify’s music social media percentage; you can use it on tons of third-party devices, adding Amazon’s Echo speakers; and you can keep track of what your Facebook friends are listening to.
Spotify’s lossless HiFi tier is rumored to arrive at some point, but its main competition already offers high-resolution audio, maximum, at no extra cost. Obviously, competition has intensified, and Spotify will want to continue to innovate if it needs to expand the default music streaming service back to as many people as possible.
A YouTube paid music service may seem redundant. After all, a few clicks on the site’s search bar will display almost any and all songs you may want to listen to, and you may not be charged a dime to play them. But it’s not a “proper” streaming service. Any prolonged listening query will be riddled with annoying ads, while background listening is rarely supported – once your phone’s screen is locked or switched to another app, the music stops.
YouTube Music is the answer. Available on iOS, Android, or through the internet player, Google’s only music streaming service offers more than 80 million songs. However, there is an explanation for this: it includes “official” recordings and anything that has already been uploaded to YouTube that can be classified as a song. So you’ll find tracks that aren’t on any other platform, but also a lot of junk that muddies the musical waters.
Since Google probably knows your music taste, we expected YouTube Music recommendations to be more relevant. Instead, it works much like other platforms, asking you to choose a range of favorite artists when you sign up and basing your initial range on them. Wait for tips while streaming.
After a one-month free trial, YouTube Music Premium costs £9. 99 per month. A family plan (£14. 99 per month) gives you up to five family accounts, while the student plan costs £4. 99 per month and requires annual verification that you are actually enrolled in an educational institution. There is also a flexible tier (YouTube Music), but it does not play in the background, provides common ads, and limits the streaming quality to 128 kbps.
There’s no higher bitrate option here. The best that YouTube Music offers is 256kbps AAC, which makes it the worst in terms of streaming quality. Even the non-HiFi tier of Spotify trumps it with 320kbps. So we can’t see golden-eared audiophiles plumping for Google’s platform over the likes of Apple Music or Tidal. That’s not to say it sounds bad, though: most people won’t be able to tell the difference between 256kbps and 320kbps – especially when the beats are pumping through tinny old earphones.
One thing we can say about YouTube Music Premium is that, with its vast library and proliferation of videos, it looks genuinely different from what’s presented here, but it’s not necessarily better.
Amazon has been offering a virtual music service since 2007, but it still turns out to be a newcomer. Not belonging to Amazon Music Prime, Amazon Music Unlimited (registration in the United States or the United Kingdom) is the company’s current rival to Spotify. It has a library of over 90 million ad-free titles and has created titles with higher bitrates (which it calls “HD” and “Ultra HD”) for all subscribers at no additional cost. Spatial audio game.
Music Unlimited costs £10. 99 per month, putting it on par with Spotify’s offer. For this, you also get the HD tier of Amazon Music at no additional cost.
You can listen to Amazon Music Unlimited through a web player, iOS and Android mobile apps, or the desktop app, as well as request tracks, albums, and artists from Alexa through Echo speakers. It is also available through Fire tablets and Fire TV. Sonos wireless multi-room speakers, Bluesound and NAD BluOS devices.
To locate new tracks, the “My Discovery Mix” feature updates your library every Monday (a concept obviously borrowed from Spotify). The tips are pretty good, but they seem boring and uninteresting. It makes little sense. A lot of algorithm-derived magic comes from Spotify advice, and not much in terms of editorial curation.
However, with its top audio quality, giant library, and moderate price, Music Unlimited is a very credible alternative, especially if you’re already a Prime member.
Tidal came out with exceptional audio quality as USP. While it is no longer the only streaming service to offer high-resolution lossless music, it is the only one to offer MQA-encoded master files.
Tidal now has about 110 million titles. While not all the quality is Master or CD, the base point is a respectable 320kbps, the same as Spotify’s highest setting. There are 3 degrees on Tidal. £10. 99 will give you access to over 110 million titles in lossless FLAC, HiRes and Dolby Atmos (there’s no special high-resolution subscription anymore). It costs £16. 99 for up to six family members, and a student account costs just £4. 99. If you’re a DJ, you can get DJ Extension, which costs an extra £9 per month and provides access to the catalogue and stem divisions through DJ partners.
Master tracks offer studio-quality recordings, but require you to have MQA-certified DAC hardware to enjoy them at the most productive 24-bit/192 kHz level. Most users will only have access to the first “run” of the MQA process, which is still in the best solution (24-bit/96 kHz) and sounds wonderful, not so different from Amazon, Apple, and Deezer’s best-solution tracks.
The user experience across Tidal’s Internet apps and player is consistent and clear. Spend a few weeks listening and get polished, personalized playlists. There are also mixes curated by publishers, radio stations, sections dedicated to MQA tracks, as well as albums and podcasts. And that’s all before you dive into articles about old albums and the like.
With 90 million music tracks, 160,000 podcast titles and over 32,000 radio stations, Deezer is divided into 3 main tiers. The free ad-supported tier includes six skips per hour of mobile listening and unlimited skips on desktop. Tracks must be available in full fidelity for all Deezer paid plans, meaning files in 16-bit, 1411kbps lossless format.
For £11. 99 per month (£5. 99 for students, £17. 99 for a family plan), you get Deezer Premium. You can save 25% on the cost of Deezer Premium by ordering the annual plan instead of paying monthly.
Deezer’s desktop and mobile programs are transparent and functional. Open the iOS app and see a scrolling page filled with albums, playlists (either pre-made or auto-generated), genre shortcuts, and more. All of this is very familiar and simple to understand.
Musical discovery is once again a main theme. When you first log in to your account, you’ll be asked to choose the artists you like so that the advice formula can get started right away; Over time, your listening activity will improve even more. We found that the Flow playlist, an endless selection of new and old music that Deezer likes, hits the mark most often.
Deezer is a very competent streaming service. That said, if you already use Apple or Amazon, there’s little incentive to switch to Deezer, while Deezer Premium offers little difference to Spotify Premium.
Like Tidal, Qobuz’s offering is aimed at high-quality streaming for audiophiles to enjoy: it’s the first music service to offer CD-quality streams, then high-resolution 24-bit files, and claims to have the “best” high-resolution quality. Catalogue res. de all existing services.
It offers two subscription tiers: Studio Premier (from £12. 99 per month or £10. 83 per month if you spend £129. 99 for a 12-month non-refundable subscription upfront) gives you access to the entire library of over 90 million titles. . , as well as original editorial content and offline listening. Studio Sublime (from £15 per month) gives you the same, but also discounts of up to 60% on purchases of high-resolution discs. Yes, it’s true: Qobuz needs allows you to reach into your pocket and buy music instead of just accessing it on demand. With the existing debate about artists’ earnings from streaming (or rather, the surprising lack of them), this may become a key promotional point for consumers looking for musicians.
As advertised, Qobuz offers a huge diversity of high-resolution music, and everything we’ve noticed here is at least CD-quality, so in terms of delivering a sound that’s pleasing to the ear, it does a job. You wonder where Spotify leaves when, at most, all of its competition can boast of streaming higher-quality streams. Still, a music service doesn’t deserve to be judged on its audio quality alone, and Qobuz isn’t so sure of itself when it comes to usability. The interface is rarely very intuitive and the search function in particular can use more filters (it has at least one high-resolution filter, so you can make sure you get the best-sounding parts first). It’s also less expensive than Tidal Hi-Fi, and it doesn’t require you to have MQA-compatible hardware to get the most out of its high-resolution library, which sounds great.
Like Tidal, Qobuz also offers its own “magazine” integrated with well-written editorial articles about bands, their recent releases, and more. Even if no one subscribes to a music service based on their non-music content, it’s a welcome bonus.
Tech journalism’s response to The Littlest Hobo: I’ve written for a multitude of titles and lived in three other countries during my more than 15 years as a freelancer. But I eventually returned to Stuff, where I specialize in writing about Got Hereras, streaming services, and my tragic Destiny addiction.
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