You’ve probably spent hours searching for the best music streaming services to stream your tunes, and it’s only gotten more complex. There are thousands of music streaming services available, and every single one of them offers a different package of services that can be used to stream different types of music.
It’s almost impossible to know which ones are best for your specific needs, so we’ve researched and paired the best music streaming services to make this list of the best music streaming platforms to stream your tracks. Read on for more information and our top recommendations.
This page provides you with a guide and list of the overall best music streaming service based on an analysis of ‘user experience, library track size, playlist creation tools and personalized customization.’ If you want to know the best platform to discover and stream new songs, follow me down this article.
Why Stream Music?
Music is an essential element of human life and culture, an ever-growing and changing industry so vast that it is impossible to master its art. There are so many ways through which music can be played, heard, distributed and enjoyed, but the most popular and stress-free way is “Streaming”.
Streaming is not only the most convenient, popular and easy way to play your favourite songs, but its music quality can sound great too. But finding the best music streaming service platform can prove quite a job, so we have gathered for you the best of it.
The minute you start using a music streaming service, you instantly realize how easy it is to create and start using a playlist. From the moment you turn on the streaming service, you’re taken on a journey through the music player, where you can choose from an array of choices for how you want to listen to your tracks. You can store your playlists on the service or give them away as an add-on. There are thousands of music streaming services to choose from, so it’s hard to know which one to use. It all depends on your taste, needs, and budget, so decide for now which one you want to use.
Why Use a Music Streaming Service?
If you’re looking for a way to get your music on the go or don’t have the time or energy to do it yourself, a streaming service is probably the way to go. You can get precisely what you’re looking for with thousands of options to choose from. If you’re looking for a way to get your favourite artists and albums in addition to your favourite genres, or you find it hard to choose, cloud-based services are a great option. They let you add the tracks you want to the cloud and store them for you, so you don’t have to spend the time and energy looking for them again the next day.
Below is our carefully examined list of the best music streaming Platforms from top to lowest in terms of quality and features.
Best Music Streaming Service 2022
1. Spotify
Spotify boasts the most advanced music discovery algorithms and the smoothest, fastest user interface. Based on what I’ve already enjoyed and listened to on the app, it led me down rabbit holes to discover new artists and old favourites.
By default, the free tier has a low-quality 96-Kbps streaming bit rate, but you can increase it to 160 Kbps. The Premium level, which costs $10 a month, removes all ads and streams at 320 Kbps, the current norm. A Spotify HiFi tier is coming soon if you want lossless, but there’s no timetable set yet.
Spotify currently has over 90 million songs of different categories, up from “more than 80 million” when we checked (February 2022). Another essential feature of Spotify is that it allows you to add an unlimited number of songs to your library, and each playlist you create can hold up to 9,000 tracks.
2. Apple Music:
Because lossless music quality is now included in Apple Music’s leading $10-per-month tier, which is about half the price of Tidal’s lossless tier, it’s the preferable audiophile selection in our judgement. By the end of 2021, Apple appears to have made its complete collection of 90 million or more songs available in a lossless format. Dolby Atmos is also available for some tracks. Apple Music’s lossy codec broadcasts songs at up to 256 Kbps, similar to Spotify’s 320 Kbps.
The Apple Music Voice Plan, which costs $5 per month, is the most recent development. There are no bothersome advertisements, but you must utilize Siri for better operation. You can’t create or view playlists, and you can’t store your favourite songs, artists, or albums. That includes songs, videos and lyrics. You can only control a few things with a tap of your finger: pause/play, forward, and back. You may ask Siri to search and play individual songs or listen to tailored playlists and radio stations. But that’s a lot of restrictions for a monthly savings of $5.
Apple’s discovery options, which are more human-curated, aren’t as enjoyable as Spotify’s. If your friends have enabled social sharing, you can see what they’re listening to, like on Spotify. However, unlike Spotify, there is a tab that displays all of your favourite songs by artist, so if you want to listen to AC/DC on your way home, it will play all of the AC/DC songs you’ve loved from all of their albums. You can only have 100,000 pieces in your collection, but you can put as many as you like in each playlist.
3. Tidal
Tidal was the previous audiophile choice with its massive lossless quality song catalogue, but it costs $20 per month vs Apple’s $10 Hi-Fi offering. It can play tracks in “Master” quality (up to 9,216 Kbps), supporting Dolby Atmos Music and 360 Reality Audio.
Tidal’s database of more than 80 million songs spans the same wide range of genres as its competitors, and it no longer focuses just on hip hop tracks. All of its songs are currently accessible in a lossless format.
If you can’t bear the prospect of biting into an Apple and fully immersing yourself in the Apple universe, Tidal is still a viable option. There are three levels of pricing. Tidal Access has been phased out in favour of Tidal Free. It’s free because it has ad interruptions, as you might expect. You can watch curated channels for free, but not videos, and the streaming quality is limited to 160 kbps. The Premium tier costs $10 a month and offers up to 320 Kbps audio.
4. YouTube Music
The YouTube Music interface is sleek and well-designed. It doesn’t try to imitate Spotify’s design, which is a good decision for an upstart music site (from a billion-dollar company). I appreciate how the music queue and lyrics appear in a vertical pane within the app, making it easy to navigate. If a music video is available, you can effortlessly go from listening to it to seeing it.
The app includes a catalogue of over 80 million songs, and I enjoyed the band recommendations. You may save 100,000 pieces to your library and create and share playlists with your friends. YouTube Music combines the most excellent artist-tracking features of Apple Music and Spotify: You may see which songs you’ve “loved” and subscribe to an artist to access their entire repertoire and new drops.
The free tier has one major drawback: the music stops playing when you turn your phone off or switch to another app. You’ll probably have to pay $10 a month for YouTube Music Premium, which removes ads and allows you to download songs for offline listening. The desktop app does not suffer from the same major flaw.
Some other Nice Streaming Services
The following are also excellent but are not as great as the top best streaming platforms listed above. I tried the next three and didn’t think they were as good as our top picks. See details below:
1. Amazon Music
The best aspect about Amazon Music is that its basic ad-free tier is free with Prime, but this is a little deceiving. It has over 75 million songs in its database. Still, you can’t listen to specific artists or albums unless you pay for Amazon Music Unlimited, which costs $8 a month for Prime members and $10 for everyone else. Amazon Music HD no longer has a monthly fee in addition to the price of Unlimited. You have unlimited access to the whole library of now lossless audio. Although Amazon Song is now substantially less expensive than before, its confusing interface and subpar music discovery hinder it from being a top choice.
2. Deezer
This international music streaming service has made several attempts to compete with Spotify, but we found it weak in functionality. It is possible to “like” only a thousand (1000) albums and artists on iPhone and Android. That’s ridiculously low, especially given the company’s 73-million-song repertoire. The music discovery ideas are also terrible. Because it’s a French streaming service, many curated playlists have songs from albums that aren’t available in the United States. When I searched the Ray Charles collections, several tracks were missing. Like Apple Music, it also had a dreadful Back button that skipped screens.
3. Pandora
Pandora is still quite popular, although its listenership has progressively declined since 2014. Ads abound in the free tier. A visual ad appears in the app window; commercials regularly interrupt your listening on the curated radio stations. You must watch advertising to skip tracks and watch ads to search for and play specific music. You can get rid of them for $5 a month, but you’ll still have to manage advertising to find your tunes. The $10-per-month Premium tier allows you to browse for songs without commercials, but it also offers unlimited skips, with the caveat that “skips (are) limited by some license constraints.” The maximum data rate of 192 Kbps is far too low to be considered acceptable concerning its price ratings.
Conclusion
They are many different platforms for you to stream your favourite songs, mixtapes, and albums; however, we have only listed the best services in descending order. We have carefully accessed and analyzed them on this page.
Finally, if you want to download the mp3 file of the song of your choice to your device’s local storage. But be careful because some of them don’t have the license to distribute those music files, to avoid legal actions.
We hope this article was helpful to you. Let us know how you feel in the comment section below.