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At the same price as Spotify, Apple Music can still offer a lot for the money, including 100 million tracks and iOS and Android compatibility. The service runs second to Spotify in terms of subscribers but surpasses its rival in one key respect. Apple Music has hi-res lossless, spatial audio albums, and a classical music app at no extra charge.
While it makes the most sense if you're an Apple user, Music is an option if you're listening on a PC, or have invested in smart speakers, including those from Google. If you own an Apple HomePod, Mini or Nest device you can summon Apple Music tracks with your voice. There are also a ton of curated playlists, many handcrafted by musicians and tastemakers, although it lacks the robust sharing options (or some of the cool add-ons) available to Spotify.
Tidal has introduced some very important changes recently: firstly, it now has the Tidal Free tier, and secondly, it has scrapped its $20 Hi-Fi Plus tier in favor of an all-inclusive $11 instead. It's worth noting that the service is still in the process of replacing its proprietary MQA files with hi-res FLAC, and it seems the company is on target to remove the format completely by it's July 26 deadline. If you're an audiophile, a fan of urban music or a mix of both, then Tidal offers a great catalog and a very attractive price.
Qobuz's streaming service offers a wealth of music in hi-res, and you don't need a special hardware decoder to listen to it. The service offers two plans: Studio Premier ($13 monthly or $130 yearly) and the $180 annual Sublime Plus. Uniquely, the service offers its own hi-res download store, and if you sign up for Sublime you get a discount on purchases.
At 100 million tracks, Qobuz's streaming catalog rivals Tidal's and Spotify's in number, and based on our tests its catalog of more obscure artists is now pretty impressive. Excellent sound quality at a decent price? Qobuz is our favorite service for serious music lovers who also want to be able to purchase tracks.
Amazon Music Unlimited | Apple Music | Qobuz | Spotify | Tidal | YouTube Music | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Monthly fee | Prime members: $10, £10, $13; Non-Prime members: $11, £11, AU$12; Echo-only service: Free, AU$6 | $11, £11, AU$13; Voice $5, £5, AU$6 | Studio: $13, £13, AU$20; Sublime (per year): $180, £180, AU$250 | $12, £12, AU$14 | $11, £11, AU$12 | $14, £12, AU$12 |
Free option? | Yes, with ads | No | No | Yes, with ads | Yes | Yes, with ads |
Free trial period | 90 days | 30 days to 3 months | 30 days | 30 days | 3 months | 30 days |
Music library size | 100 million | Over 100 million | Over 100 million | Over 100 million | Over 100 million | 100 million |
Maximum bit rate | 256Kbps, 3,730Kbps (HD) | 256Kbps, 1,152 Kbps (HD estimated) | 6,971Kbps | 320Kbps | 1,411Kbps | 256Kbps |
Family plan? | Yes, $17, £17, AU$19 for max 6 | Yes, $15, £15, AU$18 for max 6 | Yes, $22, £22, AU$30 | Yes $20, £20, AU$24 per month, max 6 | Yes, HiFi: $15, £15, AU$18 HiFi Plus: $20, £20, AU$24 max 6 | Yes, $17, £15, AU$18 per month for max 6 |
Student discount | Yes | Yes, Price varies by country | No | Yes, $6, £5 with Hulu and Showtime | Student HiFi: $5, Student HiFi plus: $10 (US only) | Yes, $8 |
US military discount | No | No | No | No | Yes | No |
Offline listening | Mobile and desktop | Mobile and desktop | Mobile and desktop | Mobile and desktop | Mobile | Premium, mobile only |
Radio stations | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No | Yes |
Podcasts | Yes | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Music videos | No | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Music locker functionality | No | Yes | No | No | No | Yes |
Amazon Prime Music comes "free" as part of a Prime membership, but users can choose to upgrade to Music Unlimited. At $10 for Prime members, or $11 if you don't have Prime, Unlimited offers an expanded catalog as well as over 1,000 "spatial" remixes. These 360 audio mixes can be played on Dolby Atmos soundbars, Android or iOS devices and the Amazon Echo Studio. In terms of usability, the Music Unlimited interface is also more powerful than before with playlists, genres and podcasts all accessible from the main page.
YouTube Music is the successor to Google Play Music, and if you sign up for the ad-freeYouTube Premium at $14 per month, you get YouTube Music for free. The good news is that YouTube Music is a mostly impressive service (the lower bit rate of 256Kbps is mildly annoying), but Google has retained the predecessor's music locker system enabling users to upload new tracks. In even better news, YouTube Music offers a clean interface plus 100 million tracks to choose from. Instead of playlists, YouTube Music offers well-curated radio stations that play endlessly and are updated often. The added ability to make playlists out of YouTube music clips also makes it a worthy option. If you have a HomePod, you can also now set it to YouTube Music by default.
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The principal thing you'll need to weigh up is your monthly cost. Until recently, prices were stable at around $10 a month, but Apple Music, Amazon Music Unlimited, Tidal, YouTube Music and Spotify have all hiked rates to $11. At the other end of the spectrum, Tidal is the most expensive at $20 a month.
While your subscription fee can give you access to a number of features -- including classical music, karaoke, podcasts and audiobooks -- what it can also do is unlock higher-quality audio. Sound quality is also an important consideration, and services such as Apple Music and Amazon Music Unlimited offer lossless and Dolby Atmos music at no extra charge. Meanwhile, Spotify is still stuck at relatively low 320Kbps, and a planned lossless Supremium tier is MIA -- though it's still rumored to appear in 2024.
If you like to buy your own digital music, Apple Music and YouTube Music are the only services to offer a digital locker to store your own library of songs.
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We've checked out the big names, including Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music, as well as smaller ones such as Tidal, Qobuz, Napster, Deezer and Pandora Premium, to see how each platform stacks up for your subscription dollar. Most of the services feature music catalogs of around 100 million tracks and are supported by a host of different devices.
Given that all of the services basically have the same libraries, we evaluated each one based on:
While Spotify offers objectively the "worst" quality based on numbers alone, most people won't notice a difference, especially on phones or Bluetooth speakers. The biggest boons for Spotify users are the service's ubiquity, community features and ability to easily pair with other devices.
Apple also gets high marks due to its suitability for iOS and Mac users, as well as the ability to listen to higher-quality streams at no extra cost. If the service was more yielding to PC users and smart home fans, Apple Music would easily become the service we would recommend. In short, Spotify is better for users of almost any phone, smart device or computer.
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Most of the streaming music services offer free tiers -- including Spotify, Pandora, Amazon and YouTube -- but they do come with a couple of caveats. Firstly, these are usually playlist services, in that you pick a song and the rest of the tunes auto-generate -- you can't pick exactly what you want to play. The other potential downside is that they come with ads, and sometimes it's the same ad for every break.
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Without contracts, it's pretty easy to cancel one service and start with another. Swapping between music services isn't as straightforward as swapping between movie locker services using Movies Anywhere for example. If you don't want to have to rebuild your playlists and library from scratch when you switch, you have two main options: a music locker service such as YouTube Music (but this implies you have a library of ripped or bought MP3s), or a library import tool such as Soundiiz. The latter is a service that lets you import the songs from each of your music services and transfer them, and while there's a $4.50 monthly charge, you can always cancel once you've converted your library. Recently, Deezer has offered the ability for new users to convert their libraries from other services for free (via another service called Tune My Music).
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The short answer is "no" and the long answer is "sort of, maybe." Stereo music has been around since the '50s and its worldwide catalog simply crushes the handful of Atmos audio tracks by comparison. Apple may rave about how "magical" spatial music is, but unless you have an expensive Dolby Atmos system, you may not be able to hear the differences anyway.
In our own tests, we've found that a well-mixed Atmos track on a dedicated setup can be fun. It's like a rollercoaster -- enjoyable, but you wouldn't want to use it as your sole form of transport. By comparison, using a pair of compatible AirPods we found the tracking to be laggy when attempting to move our heads around. On the other hand, spatial audio does make sense if you're watching a movie because you're not moving your head that much. The music industry tries unsuccessfully to push surround music every 20 years or so -- Quadraphonic in the 1970s, DVD-Audio in the 2000s -- but good old stereo will never go out of favor.
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At the time of writing, all of the services can offer at least 100 million tracks each, That's not the end of the story: The number of songs offered by a music service used to be the main differentiator, but as always, it's quality over quantity that counts -- and particularly if you're looking for more obscure tracks. Depending on your favorite genre, some of the services may offer a better catalog for under-the-radar (Spotify), indie (Apple) or hip-hop artists (Tidal). Users who are less ambitious about expanding their musical taste should be satisfied with the catalogs that all the services offer.
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Amazon was one of the first services to offer uploading your MP3 collection into the cloud, but this was officially discontinued in 2018. Meanwhile, both the Apple and YouTube services allow you to combine your personal music collection with the streaming catalog, although 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.
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Source: cnet.com