Which Music Streaming Service Should You Subscribe To?

For the music fan on the road, streaming services are indispensable, acting as a one-stop shop for discovering new tunes, adding them to your library and creating playlists for your adventures. It’s also way cheaper than buying music and a lot easier than searching on YouTube for every track. Here are the top services compared.

Spotify

For a fledgling start-up based in Sweden, Spotify has done more to impact the music industry than Google and Apple combined. The company brought on-demand music streaming to the masses and continues to outmaneuver the competition with its simple interface and well-curated content. Even the free version is robust, though it displays ads and limits how many times you can skip a song on the radio.

Amazon Music Unlimited

Most of the streaming services here will do the same thing, just with a different sequence of menus and buttons. What makes Amazon (and Google Play) unique is its ecosystem of devices and services. It has the same monthly fee of $10, but for Amazon Prime subscribers, the price goes down to $7.99 a month or $79.99 a year. There’s an even cheaper plan available at $3.99, but it’s restricted to the Amazon Alexa device.

Google Play Music

Designed with the same minimalist interface as its Android operating system, Google is hoping to beat Apple and Spotify by adding YouTube and Chromecast into the mix. Play Music subscribers also get YouTube Red for free, which allows them to use YouTube for music by enabling sound while the app is closed. Both services can be streamed on Google’s Chromecast devices, which play content through your home’s TV and sound system.

Pandora Premium

This is the app that pretty much started it all, yet is the last to catch up. Pandora revolutionized internet radio, introducing 80 million people to digital music streaming that was customized for their personal taste. Now the company is rolling out a traditional music library like Spotify. While it doesn’t do anything new, Pandora has the edge when it comes to playlist generation thanks to its decade-long head start developing the Music Genome Project, a categorization system that groups similar tracks together.

Tidal

Tidal’s wave of publicity has mostly come and gone, saved only by its several exclusive releases like Jay-Z’s Blueprint trilogy, much of Prince’s back catalogue and, most notably, Beyonce’s visual album Lemonade. One feature that gives Tidal the upper hand is a library of uncompressed FLAC files. This hi-fi format is much higher in quality than MP3 (and much larger in file size) but it comes at a cost: $19.99 for FLAC, $9.99 for MP3. Most people can’t tell the difference on their Apple Airpods, but audiophiles should go with Tidal if they want uncompromising audio streamed through their system.