The best music streaming services in 2025

Free tier: No | Individual plan: $11/month or $109/year | Family plan: $17/month (up to 6 members) | Student plan: $6/month | Streaming quality: Up to 24-bit/192 kHz ALAC

If we were forced to pick one music streaming service to recommend to most people, it’d be Apple Music. Unsurprisingly, it’s especially convenient for people who use an iPhone or other Apple products. You can favorite songs right from an iPhone’s lock screen, control your library with Siri, quickly share (or SharePlay) playlists through iMessage and subscribe as part of an Apple One subscription. The app is available on just about every Apple device, and the interface is consistent throughout, whether you’re using an iPad, Apple TV or CarPlay-enabled vehicle.

As with most music streaming services, Apple Music’s UI can be a lot to take in, but it largely strikes the right balance between algorithmic suggestions and recommendations from actual people. If you just want to jump into some tracks you’ll probably like, there’s a dedicated station tuned to your listening history, a “Discovery Station” that only serves up songs you haven’t streamed and other personalized mixes and album suggestions right at the top of the app. You can start a custom station from any track and access all of your favorited songs in one easily sortable and searchable playlist. We’ve found Apple Music’s algorithm to lean on established artists more than some alternatives, but it’s better than most at not repeating songs on a regular basis.

What gives Apple Music an edge is the way it emphasizes curation. There are diverse, regularly updated and editor-picked playlists all over the app. Many artist pages will spotlight the act’s essential works and “deep cuts.” Their albums are listed in order, and popular records are often accompanied by a thoughtful review. Most notably, there’s a collection of live radio stations, with DJ-hosted shows that spotlight new records and artist interviews. These include dedicated channels for different genres, from pop and country to Latin and “chill” music.

To be clear, Apple Music is still heavy on automated suggestions, but it has a human touch that’s easier to see than with many of its peers. You don’t feel like you’re totally giving into The Machine while using it — you still can if you want, but it’s just as easy to let real people guide you to music you may (or may not) enjoy.

Beyond that, Apple Music is one of the few services that still lets you import your own local files. That’s great if you have a big iTunes library — or, you know, value actually owning things. It also offers lossless streaming for no extra cost, with its entire catalog available in CD quality (16-bit/44.1kHz) at minimum. Most people won’t care about or even notice that, but if you have good wired headphones (and a DAC) or a decent speaker system, higher-res streams genuinely can wring out more fine details than the compressed files used by Spotify, YouTube Music and a few others.

There are still clear downsides. Only Spotify is compatible with more third-party devices and platforms, but Apple Music inevitably works best on Apple’s own stuff. The web and Windows PC apps, for instance, aren’t as polished or fully-featured as the iOS one. Apple has made a huge push into spatial audio, but that format often sounds unnatural with music that isn’t specifically mixed for it. With some algorithmic stations, the queue will only display the next track instead of giving you a larger list to peruse. There’s also no free tier. Podcasts are absent as well, though we consider that a good thing; it makes the app feel more focused and less likely to shove irrelevant content in your face.

Free tier: No | Individual plan: $13/month or $130/year (Studio); $180/year (Sublime) | Duo plan: $18/month or $180/year (Studio); $270/year (Sublime) (2 members) | Family plan: $22/month or $216/year (Studio); $350/year (Sublime) (up to 6 members) | Student plan: $5/month | Streaming quality: Up to 24-bit/192 kHz FLAC

Qobuz is worth a look for audiophiles who want a more curated music service and don’t want to funnel extra cash into tech giants like Apple or Google. Even more than Apple Music, it comes off like the streaming equivalent of a friendly music nerd. The top of the app greets you with a handpicked selection of recent albums, while a “Qobuzissime” section further down spotlights up-and-coming acts. Tons of records, new and old, come with liner-notes-like reviews. A “Magazine” tab offers a stream of fun articles; as we write this, those include interviews with Kim Wilde and Franz Ferdinand, a look back at Jimmy Carter’s connections to the music industry and a regular “Album of the Week” write-up. Qobuz emphasizes albums more than playlists overall; it wants you to engage with an artist’s complete work, not just bits and pieces encouraged by algorithms. Yet the playlists it does have are varied and thoughtful, and the UI as a whole is much cleaner, more legible and less chaotic than most of its competitors.

Like Apple Music, Qobuz includes lossless streaming for no extra cost, with FLAC files that reach up to 24-bit/192 kHz. It also lets you purchase albums outright in CD or Hi-Res quality. If you subscribe to its upper “Sublime” tier, you can get those at a discount. It all speaks to a service with a record-store mindset: Its recommendations mostly come from real people, its streams are high quality, and it doesn’t slavishly tailor itself to your listening history. Past reports suggest it’s one of the better-paying services for artists, too, something its digital album shop should only help.

Still, this sort of anti-Spotify approach has its shortcomings. When it does have to algorithmically recommend music — through a track radio, for instance, or its personalized “Weekly Q” playlist — its selections aren’t bad, but they’re usually less adventurous and far-reaching than what you’d get from certain alternatives. If you want a service that does all the discovery work for you, this is not it; you have to open to exploring new music to get the most out of it. It’s also not as receptive to sharing on social networks, and there’s no Spotify Connect-style feature for streaming across different devices just yet. While it has a huge library with more than 100 million tracks, it tends to not spotlight Top 40 hits as strongly as other services, particularly when it comes to hip-hop and pop. (Though some may view that as a positive.) There are no podcasts or audiobooks either — again, maybe a good thing — plus it costs $2 more per month than most of our other picks.

Free tier: Yes | Individual plan: $11/month or $110/year; also available as part of YouTube Premium subscription for $14/month or $140/year | Family plan: $17/month (up to 6 members) | Student plan: $5.49/month | Streaming quality: Up to 256kbps AAC & OPUS

If you’re really into YouTube, you’ll like YouTube Music. It comes included with a YouTube Premium subscription, which removes ads from the video site, allows for offline downloads and enables background playback for $14 a month. Those are significant upgrades on their own — mostly because the experience of using YouTube with ads is so mind-numbingly terrible — plus there’s a full Spotify competitor on top. If you already spend a ton of time on YouTube, this should make Google’s music service the best value by default.

Even without those perks, YouTube Music benefits from close ties to its sister site. YouTube is home to a mountain of creative works that just aren’t available on standard music services, from obscure soundtracks and rare live performances to monstrous Neil Cicierega mashups and Radiohead remixes made from Super Mario 64 sounds. With YouTube Music, you can search through those, add them to playlists and listen to them alongside more traditional releases. If you sign up with the same account, music you’ve liked on YouTube will show up right away and help inform YouTube Music’s recommendations. You also get the same class-leading selection of music videos, which you can access with a single tap.

As with Apple Music, YouTube Music lets you upload your own music files. It’s also one of the better options when it comes to surfacing new artists. It’s far more focused on algorithmic suggestions than Apple Music, and it’s not immune to repeating song recommendations if you use it long enough. But the app is loaded with personalized mixes and relevant album suggestions, and we’ve discovered many lesser-known acts through its track radios and community-based playlists.

That said, the integration with YouTube is really the thing here. Without it, there isn’t much reason to choose YouTube Music over its rivals. There’s no lossless streaming, and the home tab is as much of a hodgepodge of disparate elements as any other service. (Though a nifty “Speed Dial” in the mobile app makes it easy to hop into recent plays, and it’s nice that you can pin specific albums and playlists to it for fast access.) The ability to pull in music you’ve liked on YouTube is convenient but sometimes sloppy in execution, as those likes won’t always integrate your library neatly. In general, there are few of the editorial touches you’d find in Apple Music or some of our other picks below.

YouTube Music also has podcasts, technically, but the selection mainly consists of YouTube videos that are marked as podcast content. Many shows still appear as promised, but this means some feeds consist of brief clips more than full episodes. You can add missing podcasts to your library via RSS, but that’s an extra step apps like Spotify don’t force you to take. We’d also be remiss not to mention Google’s long history of killing its own products, including this service’s predecessor. Nevertheless, the company seems committed to gradually improving YouTube Music today.

Free tier: Yes | Individual plan: $12/month | Duo plan: $17/month (2 members) | Family plan: $20/month (up to 6 members) | Student plan: $6/month | Streaming quality: Up to 320kbps Ogg Vorbis

Spotify is the most popular music streaming service, and as such it’s available on the widest array of devices and platforms. A Spotify Connect feature makes it a breeze to move your stream from one device to another without losing your place. It also has a decent free tier — not good, mind you, as you still have to deal with ads, limited track skips and no offline downloads — which provides access to most of the service’s social features and gigantic music and podcast catalog at no cost.

Those social features are another area where Spotify excels. You can follow friends, discover and collaborate on other people’s playlists and easily share your own mixes. You likely know about Spotify Wrapped, which remains a certified Big Deal every year. With many artists, you can also view tour dates right from the app and find links to buy tickets and merch.

If you want podcasts and audiobooks alongside your music, meanwhile, Spotify has gone all-in on those. Most podcasts you enjoy are probably on here, a number of popular shows are exclusive to the service and paid members get 15 hours of audiobook streaming as part of their subscription.

Spotify is built around playlists much more than full albums, and it leans harder on “the algorithm” than rivals like Apple Music. The good news is that many of those playlists are genuinely great. “Discover Weekly” fully deserves its reputation for digging up tracks you haven’t streamed but still align with your tastes. A regularly updated “daylist” morphs with the kind of music you stream at different points in the day. What feels like a billion other mixes based on artists, decades, moods and more nebulous concepts (from “cottagecore” to “escapism” to “Ethiopian jazz”) are mostly on point. There’s still plenty of manually curated playlists as well: Things like “Rap Caviar,” “New Music Friday” and “Viva Latino” may not be personalized to your tastes, but they’re clearly put together by knowledgeable people who are in tune with current trends.

In truth, other services are no longer that far behind Spotify when it comes to surfacing relevant new music. Still, simply following the app down its many rabbit holes will usually lead you to something enjoyable, and its playlists typically do well to mix lesser-known acts in with the big names.

Spotify’s biggest issue is its interface: It’s kind of a mess. The desktop app has a handy sidebar that provides fast access to your library, while the mobile app puts several playlists, podcasts and recent listens right at the top. After that, there are rows of podcast and audiobook suggestions sandwiched between a shotgun blast of playlists. At least some of those, however, may be programs you’ve never shown an interest in. The way Spotify pushes you toward aesthetically similar content is good for finding three-minute songs, but it’s much more obnoxious when applied to hours-long shows. Podcasts are not music; you can’t group and recommend them by vibe the way you can with certain tracks. If we like the Engadget Podcast, for instance, that doesn’t mean we want to spend another 80 minutes listening to other, possibly more aggravating people talk tech.

Keep scrolling, and the mobile app descends into a string of large TikTok-style suggestion cards. These look slick, but scrolling through a feed of giant icons, one recommendation at a time, isn’t an efficient way of finding something interesting. Spotify has also spent the last couple of years pushing an “AI DJ” tool that works like an algorithm-based personal radio station, but while it’s technically impressive, it still tends to make jarring leaps between genres. In our most recent round of testing, it managed to jump from Fleetwood Mac to Playboi Carti within five tracks.

And while we realize that everyone consumes music differently, it must be said that the app’s playlists-over-all approach essentially devalues the album as a concept. Intentional or not, it can turn listening to music into an echo chamber, one where you don’t have to engage with the way musicians make their art.

In more objective issues, Spotify lacks any sort of lossless streaming despite confirming a CD-quality “HiFi” tier four (!) years ago. Every few months, we get whispers of the service coming actually for real this time, but at this point we’ll believe it when we see it. Though you can play local files through the Spotify app, you can’t import them into your library across devices as neatly as you can with Apple’s service. The Premium plan also costs a dollar more per month than Apple Music (for now).

Last but not least, while no music streaming service properly values artists — buy merch and tickets, folks — Spotify has a particularly horrible reputation for low payouts. A recent Harper’s report even said that the company has populated some playlists with copy-cat tracks credited to fake artists to further pinch pennies. (The company has disputed this.) Ultimately, our guide is for consumers, and Spotify still does enough well in certain areas to be a worthwhile product for some people. In many ways, however, it has become the poster child for the streaming industry’s most worrying traits.

Free tier: No | Individual plan: $11/month | Family plan: $17/month (up to 6 members) | Student plan: $5.49/month | Streaming quality: Up to 24-bit/192 kHz FLAC

Tidal is something like a half-step between Qobuz and Spotify. Like the former, it offers lossless streaming and Hi-Res FLAC files for no extra cost, and it focuses on curation and editor-led discovery features more than most of its peers. Past reports have said it’s better about compensating artists than competitors, and it takes care to provide extensive, interactive credits for most tracks.

At the same time, it isn’t as aggressive about downplaying algorithmic suggestions, playlists and more mainstream hits. It also has features like Tidal Connect (which makes it easier to stream across devices), music videos, animated album art and live lyrics. It’s $2 cheaper than Qobuz per month, and its UI is much less cluttered than Spotify’s, so it’s a fine compromise if you’re passionate about music but don’t want to give up features common in modern music apps.

That said, it can feel like a compromise. Some hand-curated features — articles from “Tidal Magazine,” a “Tidal Rising” tab designed to highlight up-and-coming acts, various staff-picked playlists and album suggestions — are less visible in the app than their equivalents on Qobuz. On mobile, the top of the home tab provides quick links to a few of your recent listens, then displays a separate “Recently played” tab just under it, which is redundant. While we’ve found plenty of new music through Tidal’s algorithmic suggestions, its automated song radios repeat the same artists more frequently than we’d like. The service isn’t as widely available on other devices as Spotify or Apple Music, either. Nevertheless, Tidal is easy to like, and it’s gotten better over time.