Best Music Streaming Service for 2022
With new features like spatial music and podcasts, competition between Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube Music is keener than ever.
Almost every single person these days has a subscription to a music streaming service. If you're someone who hasn't made the leap yet, you're in for a world of convenience and discovery, allowing you to listen to hundreds of thousands of artists easily and quickly. And while audiophiles might decry the quality of streamed music, a growing number of providers include lossless and spatial Dolby Atmos audio. With so many different music services on offer, how are you supposed to choose?
If you're shopping around for a new music provider the two things you need to consider most are monthly cost and compatibility. Most of the services have music catalogs of over 60 million songs, so that's not really an issue, and they enable you to stream from multiple devices though some services enable this better than others. While prices have been more stable at around $10 a month (not something I can say about live TV streaming) there have been other big changes recently, including the addition of hi-res music.
I've checked out the biggest names, including Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music, as well as smaller contenders such as Tidal, Qobuz, Deezer and Pandora Premium, to see how each platform stacks up for your subscription buck. It's worth noting that, in this roundup, I've purposefully left out services that can only play music in a radio format (such as Pandora, Napster and UnRadio) and which don't allow you to select your own songs. Streaming should be about choice, and that includes being able to listen to whole albums at a stretch.
So which music streaming services offer the best combination of price, sound quality and library size? Read on to find an in-depth look at each of the services and a feature comparison, along with a full price breakdown in the chart at the bottom of the page. We'll update this list periodically.
2022-08-30 03:16:40
