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Vinyl ruled the Sixties and Seventies, cassettes helped define the Eighties, CDs caught fire in the Nineties, and digital music stores like iTunes took over in the early aughts — but nothing has made music more accessible than the streaming services launched in the past decade.

Major tech companies and startups alike are offering you access to millions of songs for the equivalent of one CD purchase per month, and the benefits are clear: easy access to a huge library of music, streaming anywhere from mobile devices, with the option to download music for offline listening, curated playlists based on your music taste, and a constant flow of new music.

At A Glance: The Best Music Streaming Services 2024

All of those great features are offered by every music service, though, so we’ve chosen to highlight the top six best music streaming services with exclusive features you should actually care about.

Spotify recently reported it has 626 million monthly active users, which makes it the most popular music streaming service by several orders of magnitude. One of the reasons it’s so appealing is that the company offers a totally free tier, which is a good deal if you’ve never tried a music streaming service before.

Subscribers to Spotify’s free tier get access to the same 50 million song library, and an increasingly long list of podcasts — some of which are available exclusively through its service. Spotify has a lot going for it, but free subscribers will have to listen to an advertisement after streaming a few songs. You also can’t download tracks to your device for offline listening, so you’ll always need an active internet connection.

Those restrictions can be lifted by subscribing to Spotify Premium, which costs minimum $12.99 per month (unless you qualify for their student discount). That being said, even while testing Premium, we did miss out on the ability to stream hi-res, lossless versions of our favorite albums — switching between Apple Music and Spotify, the difference in audio quality is palpable, even for those with not-so-keen ears. They’re far behind the curve on this compared to other streamers at similar price points, and it’s the one feature we hope they’ll integrate sooner rather than later.

Spotify does offer a free three-month subscription to Premium if you’ve never checked the service out before. You’ve got nothing to lose, and always have the option of upgrading later on if you’d like.

Editor’s picks

If you’re an Amazon Prime subscriber, you get a lot more perks than just free two-day shipping, including a free subscription to Prime Music.

Prime Music has all of the major features I mentioned above with one caveat: its library “only” has a couple of million tracks. For reference, the company’s paid music subscription service Amazon Music Unlimited gives you access to a library of 60 million songs. Amazon Music Unlimited starts at $9.99 per month for Prime members, and $10.99 per month for non-Prime members.

With that restriction aside, Prime Music stacks up really well against other music streaming services. Although it’s “free,” Prime Music has no ads, offers offline listening with unlimited skips, and access to thousands of radio stations and curated playlists. Those first two features are typically only available for paid music subscription services.

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If you have an Alexa-integrated speaker (we recommend the Sonos Era 100, Marshall’s Stanmore III, and the Sony SRS-RA3000 360, which we used for testing), you can play tracks, albums, or playlists by using your voice. This feature is also available through Amazon’s own smart speaker, the Amazon Echo Studio. If you don’t have an Amazon Prime subscription, you can sign up for a 30-day free trial to check out Prime Music for about a month to see if it’s for you.

Before Tidal was launched in 2014 and subsequently acquired by Jay-Z’s Project Panther Bidco Ltd. in 2015, Apple Music was the only audiophile game in town if you wanted access to lossless audio and Dolby Atmos support at no extra cost.

At the same price as Spotify, Apple Music is still one of the only services able to offer a lot of quality bang for your buck, from hi-res tracks, to spatial audio albums, and even a new classical music app at no extra charge (not to mention giving their year-end “Replay” stats feature a major update last year that is now more similar in aesthetic to Spotify Wrapped). But more importantly, Apple boasts a catalog of over 100 million tracks, all of which are available in lossless format with audio streams at 1411 kbps. Songs in their regular format play at 256 Kbps, which won’t sound too different from Spotify’s 320 Kbps.

That being said, like most Apple products, this streaming service works best if you’ve already bought in to the Apple ecosystem — since we tested it out on an iPhone 16 and a Macbook Pro, we feel like we got the fullest experience, but lossless audio is still only available on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV 4K, and Android devices. The web player doesn’t support lossless audio, either, which can be a dealbreaker for Windows PC users.

Apple Music offers a $10.99 per month Single Membership and a $16.99 monthly Family Membership (up to six people using iCloud Family Sharing). This’ll get you ad-free music listening and music videos, offline listening, and access to Apple Music radio. They do offer a one-month trial, which is plenty of time to try before you subscribe. If you already own an Apple HomePod device, you can even play Apple Music tracks or playlists with your voice.

Apple Music not only offers a wealth of discovery playlists hand-curated by musicians if you’re looking for new music, but lossless streams are on-par with top competitors, which is a win-win in our books.

Liner notes were one of the biggest losses in the transition from vinyl and CDs to all-digital music, but Qobuz has a solution.

The streaming service offers hi-res (better than CD-quality) music, and offers apps on all major mobile and desktop operating systems. We’ve tried Qobuz for ourselves, and the selection of music is great, and the apps (Mac and iOS is what we tried) were stable and easy to use. But, the main reason to consider subscribing to this service is that some albums come with digital liner notes. They’re not available for every album, which is a shame, but a lot of recent releases come with these high resolution digital booklets. At 100 million tracks, though, Qobuz’s streaming catalog easily rivals that of Tidal or Spotify.

Qobuz is also the only streaming service that offers high resolution music downloads, which you’ll own outright. Subscribers to its Sublime plan, which costs $179.99 per year (it breaks down to $14.99 per month) get up to 60% off on hi-res digital downloads from the Qobuz store, which is a perk no other streaming service can match. You can subscribe to its Studio plan for $129.99 if you pay annually ($12.99 per month), or as low as $10.83 per month for a monthly plan.

If you’re curious about the service, Qobuz offers a free 30-day trial to its Studio plan. This will give you more than enough time to check out their library and liner notes feature.

One of the big knocks serious audiophiles have had with streaming services is the loss of audio quality compared to a CD, high resolution formats like SACD and DVD-A, or high resolution music files encoded in formats like .DFF, .FLAC.

Tidal changes that completely, recently scrapping their higher-end subscription tier Tidal HiFi Plus in favorite of allowing everyone with a base plan to stream some albums in higher-than-CD resolutions. We wrote an explainer on the differences between lossy, lossless, and high-resolution music streaming, but the bottom line is that albums available as “Tidal Master”-quality will sound better than any other streamable version. We’ve had a chance to listen for ourselves, and the difference is immediately noticeable.

While a basic subscription costs $10.99 a month, you’re getting what you pay for. Tidal is offering a free trial right now, which is a great deal to get into if you want to experience the platform. One thing to consider is that you’ll need to invest in the right audio gear to take full advantage of Tidal HiFi, since wireless audio technologies like Bluetooth will compress the quality. Although they’re still in the process of replacing proprietary MQA files with hi-res FLAC for better compatibility, you’ll still need a specialized decoder to listen to MQA.

If you’re listening through a home theater, we recommend the Sonos Amp, WiiM Mini, or Q-Acoustic’s M20 bookshelf speakers. On a computer or on a mobile device, we recommend AudioQuest’s DragonFly Black DAC (digital analog converter) and Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S2e headphones, which can be used as a wired or Bluetooth pair.

If you miss the days of discovering new bands and artists by tuning through radio stations, SiriusXM‘s companion streaming app seeks to add out-of-car convenience to radio.

Last year, SiriusXM announced a “Streaming All Access Plan” that combines music, talk shows, podcasts, and sports. Although we like the ability to “build a plan” that gives you the ability to cater your subscription to what you actually want to listen you (whether that’s sports play-by-play and Howard Stern, or your favorite Eighties station), in and outside of your vehicle.

The main reason you’ll tune in though, is for the music curated by experts and DJs in every genre and decade. While you won’t be able to build a traditional “library” of saved tracks and albums like other streamers, their redesigned discovery, playback and search features was easy enough to use, and let us build a kind of portfolio of radio genres. Not to mention the benefit of live NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL games, as well as news coverage and analysis is unparalleled. The app even offers exclusive video content of in-studio shows and performances, similar to Tidal.

If you don’t have a car, there is an App-only subscription tier available for $9.99/month, although it is a bit lacking if you’re already paying for another music streamer where you can listen to songs on-demand. What’s more useful in our opinion is the car radio and app bundle for $24.88/month, so you can keep the party going once you step out of the car. This is all to say that SiriusXM recently announced $200M in budget cuts and a major pivot away from streaming, so we wouldn’t expect many significant app updates in the future. That being said, the juice is worth the squeeze if you want to listen to your favorite radio stations or talk show hosts on the go.

How We Chose the Best Music Streaming Services

We based our testing on using each streamer for at least one month, and comparing factors such as price, ease-of-use, features, and audio quality. The same pair of Bowers & Wilkins Pi8 wireless earbuds was used when listening through each platform, as well as directly through Bluetooth speakers from companies like Sonos and Sony. We also tested the streamers’ UI available on computers (PC and Mac), smartphones, and tablets (iOS and Android). For example, Apple got high marks for it’s usability for iOS and Mac users (along with offering hi-res streams at no extra cost), but Spotify’s UI was the most consistent for almost any user, regardless of phone, smart device, or computer type.