Music streaming is a modern commodity. For just about $10-15 a month, you can listen to almost all recorded music. Down below, I will be summarizing the pros and cons of each, my own experience with them, and if I used one on iOS and Android, I'll compare the experience on each. I'll also delve deeper on the pros and cons with a paragraph under the table. I'll also state issues that I have with all of them once we get to the end. Feel free to leave a comment!
Let's start with the behemoth.
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Spotify started it all (sort of. There were others before it like Pandora, but I'll talk about that later). I have cycled through Spotify every now and then, going from one tier to the other, and my experience has been a mixed bag. For one thing, I think the app, both on desktop and mobile, is cluttered. The image is of the desktop UI, and I feel like library being the left-hand column, then what you're searching for in the middle, then what's playing being on the right feels like it is too much at once. The good news is that you can fold away any of these elements to declutter. The mobile app, however, feels like it's trying to be TikTok. There are videos everywhere. It feels overstimulating at times. You also can't remove certain items from your home, although you can filter categories. I think my least favorite aspect of the UI is how they handle lyrics. If you click lyrics on the desktop app, then the middle pane becomes a giant field of text. On mobile, the lyrics peek out from under the player, so you always have a random red square taking real estate at the bottom. I think they changed it to the lyrics showing up line by line under the album art, but this is also a lot of information to put on that page. Also, the way you scroll down to see upcoming shows, related, etc. is an awkward design choice.
To be honest? I thought the best features were Spotify Connect, Jam, and the daylists. It was nice to be able to go from one device to another without losing what I was playing. I did enjoy the social aspect of being able to join a Jam so I could queue songs for parties. The daylists were addictive, but I also felt that much like the mixes, they were a bit repetitive. I didn't always want to listen to x genre at x time, but I could always listen to something else. I messed up by listening to a specific album for a friend once, and it started playing me similar music, even though it wasn't a genre I cared for. It gave up after about two weeks. The mixes are also too many and too long, so it's impossible to listen to all six unless you're literally listening from dawn to dusk, and even then. It felt like a way to keep me on the app since I didn't want to miss out in case I discovered a new song. And for giving grief to the UI, I did like the way you could easily flip between all releases, just albums, just singles/eps, and compilations, as well as display them as a box or a list. The plus sign allowing you to add songs to playlists and/or your library was also a nice touch, but the heart was definitely a better UI element (RIP).
Otherwise, I hate the way the library is organized with Artist, Album, and Tracks being separate libraries. This is something that most streaming services besides Apple Music and Plex do, and I personally dislike it. It could just be from growing up with iTunes, Zune, MediaMonkey, etc. but I like having the library actually organized so that when I click on an artist I see which albums I have and then I can see the tracks in that album. Artists on most streaming services just send you to their page on that service. Spotify is the least offensive of these since you at least have an unlimited amount of likes when it comes to tracks and albums, and you can organize those by artist. I also do not like the way Spotify and YT music have a slider for album art or video. I like that the video is separate in other services, but it also is convenient to just swipe. Lastly, while the algorithm works pretty well, I do find it to be overkill in that it edits playlists to be specifically catered to your tastes. The service seems afraid to let you experience a song you might not like.
Overall, you can't actually go wrong with Spotify, but I wouldn't recommend it based solely on the CEO using the money to fund AI warheads. A lot of artists are also leaving due to this and the low royalties. Also, if you don't pay for premium, you get inundated with pop-up ads, unskippable ads between tracks, and you can't even pick what you want to listen to, so it's not even worth it. Finally, it is one of the only services not doing anything about the rise of AI spam in artist pages since they don't have to actually pay anyone out. You can't go wrong with Spotify, but you can also can't go right.
Quick blurb about iOS versus Android for this one. The lock screen player on Android is better since you can control the shuffle and repeat from there plus add songs to your library, but the app looks better on iOS since it has less weirdly transparent elements; however, the add to library isn't always present on iOS for some reason.
Let's see what Apple has to offer.
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Apple Music is probably the second most popular service, and I think it's with good reason. I used it back when it was just supposed to be like a limited iPod on your phone. It started evolving, and I became used to the UI to the point that when I decided to go from a streaming service instead of pirating, I chose Apple Music right away since I was already familiar with it. I liked that it was a familiar environment. I also liked that as I changed my library from downloaded and purchased files to streaming, it allowed me to continue to use those files in the cloud if they weren't on the service. I will say that it is a little annoying that you have to download them in specific formats since the program does not accept flac files, and that it is also annoying to purchase a file in the alac file format only for the cloud to convert it to a lossy 256kps aac file. It is great that it is so easy to integrate your own files into the service, however, since this isn't a common feature.
I think I'd say Apple Music is very much focused foremost on the music, especially compared to Spotify. A lot of the extra features make it feel more like a record store or radio than Spotify's attempts to shove playlists, mixes, audiobooks, and podcasts down your throat. You don't really get suggestions unless you go to specific tabs, and even then, it's based on your listening history instead of telling you "New Music Friday, here's Ariana Grande because she's popular." I will say that it takes longer for this algorithm to pick up on your listening habits compared to Spotify. It also doesn't do daylists or as many mixes as other services but rather relies on "Find Your Mood" Stations (Energy, Love, Heartbreak, Feel Good, Relax, Focus, and Feeling Blue) your personal For You Station, the Discovery Station, plus actual radios hosted by people like Estelle, Elton John, Matt Wilkinson, etc. You do also get a daily Rotation mix of songs you've been listening to on repeat plus weekly Chill, Get Up!, Favorites (think they changed it to your name), and Friends Mix. I will say that these can be very repetitve, though, and might be the same few tracks alternating from one week to the next. I found listening to the actual radio stations to be the best way to discover new music, but I'd also recommend making sure that you go directly to the track to add it to your library since the radio stations play the clean versions of songs. Aside from that, the sound quality on Apple Music is top grade, especially if they have an Apple Digital Master stamp on them. It's also easy to edit metadata once you've added music to your library, so you can add a song that's only on streaming via a Greatest Hits compilation and then edit to be the actual abum it's from with the correct album artwork. The full album artwork is beautiful though, and it gives Apple Music a certain charm to it. I will say that the UI is probably the best of any streaming service--but only on mobile. I'll also admit that it has my favorite queue system, since you can queue songs like on Spotify, but you can also queue a song to play next, play after everything you've queued, or even move a song to the top in the queue.
I don't want to gloss over the negative just because it's the service I used for the longest, so let's go. In earlier iterations of Apple Music, there was a plus button on the bottom row that you could tap to add a song to your library. For some reason, Apple decided to hide most of the options like add to playlist, add to library, go to album/artist/track, etc. behind a menu you have to click. They added a favorite button, which you can program to add a song to your library, but it also adds it to a favorites playlist. Some of us don't really use playlists, so it comes off as unnecessary. If you want to use autoplay, repeat a song, change shuffle, or try automix, you have to hit the queue button for those options to appear instead of them being right next to the player's controls. Another issue is that Dolby (and this goes for every service) sounds really mediocre most of the time. It also makes the songs quieter. You need a very specific system to be able to use it. Also, while the mobile app is amazing, the web player and desktop program are a bit clunky to use in comparison. I also wish they had kept the iTunes feature of clicking an album and having the tracks dropdown, but instead, clicking an album takes you to a separate page. For some reason, on the web version, you can't hit a letter and have the list automatically scroll to an artist that starts with that letter; plus, the shuffle will only play tracks within a certain letter range. Lastly, I'll say that the autoplay feature and radios are great for discovering new music, but they can get repetitive. My radio station would constantly play the same few songs, and it would strangely also group them by three into their genres. Autoplay would sometimes play the song I initially hit again after a stream of like ten other songs. One last thing that might go under the radar for most is the desktop app (and possibly the mobile app) splitting albums up or moving songs to a compilation playlist. The fact it reorganized your library really irritated me since I couldn't find songs at times. The glitch with the split albums could be fixed by changing the metadata, but sometimes, you'd have to delete the album and add it again to fix it.
I'll add that I actually preferred the experience on Android. Not sure why, but the background colors are more vibrant on Android, the crossfade is better, and the lockscreen music player gives you more control over the music than the iOS one. You can hit shuffle, repeat, and add to library from the lock screen, whereas you only get the ability to play, pause, rewind, forward, and change output on iOS. A lot of the issues on iOS are fixed by downloading Marvis Pro, but using Marvis Pro means you surrender some functionality, especially when it comes to radio. You also can go to settings directly in the Apple Music app on Android but have to go into your settings app on iPhone to make any changes to Apple Music.
Overall, I think that Apple Music is a good streaming service that feels more like it's catered towards music listeners. I think there are some issues that could be resolved, and I think that they definitely should implement a Connect-style feature. Currently, if you're on iPhone, you can AirPlay music to an AppleTV or Mac, but it doesn't transfer to the Apple Music app on those devices, it just shows up as airplayed audio. If you have an Android-based TV, you can only cast with an Android device, although with SamsungTV, you have to project your screen. I think a lot of these limitations are due to Apple trying to keep people within their ecosystem, so they make Apple Music difficult to use or nonexistent on anything but Apple devices. If you're deep into the Apple ecosystem, you can't go wrong with this service, but I will say be mindful of how much brownnosing the current CEO has done to a certain official.
Swedish service with Jay-Z backing, but does it hold up?
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I think with Tidal, I would have really recommended an earlier version of it that integrated with Plex. Is the current version bad? I don't think so. It needs some TLC, though, and it seems like the development team is giving it to them. For a while, Tidal was the only way to listen to music in CD quality and up (debatable if humans can hear differences beyond CD quality). It was later exposed that the music they were labeling as Studio Quality was actual in a compressed format, but I'm going to ignore that controversy since they've mostly gone and replaced these files with flacs. For a while, this service cost double what the others did, but it also had a free tier where you could listen to music at 128kps aac. Currently, you can listen to music in any quality for $12 a month, so the higher tier has been done away with.
What I liked about Tidal was the way that the player had the buttons you needed on the bottom of the screen. If you wanted to switch to lyrics, there was a lyrics button, and then you could check credits and related music with another button, see your queue, and then return to the main player from the bottom row. For some reason, they decided to redesign the player screen and changed it to look exactly like Spotify, but with a better lyrics screen. It removed the identity of Tidal for me since everything else was very much like Spotify as is, especially the search and home page. It's a little reductive to me. Unfortunately, half the time when you search, the results don't let you queue music by swiping, so it is also less functional.
The library system is the same as Spotify's; however, your liked/all-time tracks have a 10,000 track limit so it's easier to split the library between tracks and albums, which also have a 10,000 limit. Mobile, desktop, and web version also will not even load more than 2000 items at a time, so this limit doesn't matter. You might also be listening to your library, a playlist, an album, etc. and have to pause for whatever reason, but instead of actually saving that song in the cache, Tidal will rewind a few tracks up while you're inactive. Also, autoplay is an option in settings, so turning it on and off requires you to exit the player and find the toggle, and then following that process again to turn it off.
I think it's a pretty good service, and I recommend it for anyone who wants to focus specifically on music. I do like that the TV app focuses on Video Mixes instead of Music mixes. I think that the algorithm here is more likely to suggest something I don't like by trying its best to understand my diverse taste, but I think that's a good thing. I do want to give it another go because of the AI song filter. I remember Tidal being the worst when it came to AI songs in popular artists' profiles. The profiles system is also kind of bad and multiple artists appear under the same tag. It's a good system but it needs some more attention. If you check the subreddit, it appears like the devs are listening to people's complaints and attempting to fix things and add features people request, so that's hopeful. I'd like to see how this one advances.
Update! I've been using Tidal for a bit now, and the app is still buggy. It still rewinds your queue to a previous song if you don't use your phone for a bit, so that bug has not been fixed. The app also doesn't work well with alarms and will stop streaming a song or will stream the first song in your queue on top of the current song. The cache system is just bad with it not even loading upcoming songs in lower quality if you're waiting for a train in the subway. The Connect feature is very undercooked as well since it doesn't work between the webpage/desktop app and mobile app at all. It will also not disconnect from a speaker when you connect headphones to it, instead still playing from your speaker until you hit the connect button and change it to stream from your personal device twice. I will say that the redesign looks nicer than I thought, and that I prefer the flat colors to the previous constant dark gray to black gradient. The TV app also finally updated and shows the name of the song and artist on music videos instead of being blank like before, but this could be a difference between the AppleTV and GoogleTV apps.
Est-ce que tu parles musique?
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Qobuz--and I'll add Deezer to it (while stating that Deezer has the same limits as Tidal) are streaming services I haven't used too much, mostly because the apps are buggy and crash. I also found Qobuz especially to be overpriced. For the same price, you get music videos, radios, playlists, etc. on Spotify and Apple Music. For the longest time, Qobuz didn't even have lyrics, and this was barely implemented about a month ago as of writing this (so July of 2026). It is the service my nephew uses, so I have mostly only used it when he's around.
Overall, I think it's a good product, and the price is probably fair for what it's offering since it does seem to pay artists the most. It also allows you to buy albums directly and download them in different formats much like Bandcamp, although it has a larger library than Bandcamp for purchases. It does, however, probably have the smallest library of any streaming service, which is a shame since I did find the audio quality to probably be the best of any I tried with Youtube Music and Spotify being the worst. It is probably the most ethically sound service (as far as we know).
Again, this is personal preference, but I don't like splitting the Artist part of the library from the Album and Tracks. It seems dumb to click on the artist only to be sent to their page instead of your saved albums. Spotify saves itself a bit by allowing you to click on a liked songs tab, but Qobuz, Tidal, Deezer, etc. do not have this option. I also thought it was weird that it didn't have any music videos. The player does autoplay related tracks, but the algorithm for it seems to be the weakest. It now has DailyQ and WeeklyQ which are mixes that suggest new songs based on your listening history. Qobuz focuses more on human curation, so they tend to suggest music in their online magazine.
It's not a bad service, and Qobuz Connect is probably as good as Spotify Connect, but I wouldn't pay $1-2 more a month for this service when you can pay for something with more features. I say Tidal as probably on the same league of being ethical, unless they've done something I'm unaware of, and it's cheaper. Either way, the mobile apps for both are a mess.
Google wants this data too
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I didn't use YouTube Music for too long since I found the UI overstimulating. It was less overstimulating than Spotify, but I hated the bar with the thumbs up and comments. Not sure of those can be removed. It seems like a lot of developers make their own skins for YT music, though, especially since there's no official desktop app.
I will give YT music credit since you can listen to a lot of unreleased music due to it being uploaded to YouTube at some point. This means that it technically has the most vast library of any streaming service. Unfortunately, the sound caps at 256kps AAC, so you don't even get the most basic 16bit/44khz CD quality. Furthermore, most uploads of unreleased tracks are worse than that. Crunchy is the best way to describe it. You can also upload your own library in any format with a generous cap of 100,000 tracks, so you can use it as a cheap cloud backup. Unfortunately, the player has an issue showing more than 5000 tracks at a time from what I heard, so good luck getting it to play your personal files.
I do use YT music with an adblock every now and then to discover new music. I'll say that it is easy to use and that the autoplay does tend to play similar music, although I feel like at times it is repetive, and I get the same playlist if I start with a specific song. I say try to create two autoplays with the same track to test yourself. It always starts with another song by the same artist, and then it'll play the same few popular tracks from certain artists. I think a lot of autoplays are like this, but it is more apparent to me with YT music.
The biggest issue with YT is that it is owned by Google, so you just have to decide if your musiscal taste is another thing you want Google to sell to advertisers. I'm not even sure if my adblock does anything, and if it's not just realizing a sadboi gay Mexican who listens to a lot of indie in different languages.
Quickly, I'll go over some others, starting with Pandora. Pandora Radio is nostalgic for me since I discovered a good chunk of music on there, and I loved that it would give you . It was a fun and free radio station generator, but like all good things, it got progressively worse once they started adding ads and limiting skips. I'll start with the positive and say that they have a free tier, you can play what you want even on lower tiers by watching an ad, and you get more than three skips if you watch an ad. It also has podcasts if you like that. There's a lot of negative, though. The audio quality is actually horrendous, capping at 192kps mp3 for the highest tier, which costs as much as other services, even though they either offer lossless audio or 256kps aac (what Bluetooth currently caps at). I also get why they'd allow you pick music, but it defeats the purpose of Pandora, which is to enter a song or songs and then have their service find similar sounding music. For personal taste, the UI is probably the ugliest to me. It has too much white space and looks dated.
Soundcloud is another I tried, just to see what it was like. It is good for people who want to upload their own music, but they've changed it from what it used to be to a tier system for artists in order for them to gain promotion. You also have an upload limit unless you pay for the highest Artist tier. They also have Fan tiers now since they also introduced ads to their service that used to be ad-free. I wouldn't recommend paying anything higher than the first fan tier for ad-free, and even then, I wouldn't recommend that either. The audio quality, again, is pretty terrible, even if you pay the full $12 a month for the highest tier. It also has a small catalog due to it mostly being amateurs. Artists also basically pay $8-9 a month just for exposure. The best part of the service to me was the way the music player scrolled the album art, and I can't recommend something based on aesthetics alone.
If you do want to support artists, I think Bandcamp is actually the best extra service. Not only is it free, but you can buy albums directly with the money going to the artist themselves. If you want to support my music, please feel free to check out my Bandcamp. I will say that as a streaming service, it is limited. Unless you buy the music, it streams at 128kps mp3s, so the quality is not great. You also sometimes are limited by the artist with which tracks on the album you can listen to and/or how many times you can listen to a track/album before you are prompted to purchase it. Bandcamp does have good discovery tools in the form of radio shows that focus on specific genres you can find on Bandcamp. I think it's a great platform for supporting artits and building your own personal library, but it isn't a replacement for streaming or owning.
Overall, I think streaming has its purposes. I don't think it's as awful as others make it out to be. I don't think there's a perfect service, just one that works for individuals. The main issue I have with most streaming services has nothing to do with the services themselves and everything to do with record companies removing songs and albums with no reason. The other main issue now is how much AI music is being shoveled into these services. Apparently, around 40-48% of new music uploaded daily is AI generated, but of that, only about 1-3% has an audience, but of that audience, about 90% is bots. It's just robots listening to robots. My actual problem with it is that a lot of times these songs are uploaded under already existing artists' profiles, and many services do nothing to remove them. My last issue is that I tend to find the algorithms repetitive. I think they latch onto songs they know you'll like and play them to the point of exhaustion. There is one final option that has nothing to do with streaming, so let's discuss it next.
Update!Going through a streaming service again reminded me of one other thing I dislike. I do not like that remasters and deluxe editions are listed as separate albums instead of variations of the same album. It also doesn't count reissues or single versions of songs as the same track, so you'll sometimes have duplicates in your library unintentionally. The service will also say you don't have a song in your library even if you do because it reads the reissue or remaster as a separate track. It starts to get confusing, and I've had to double-check sometimes if I forgot to add a song to my library. I also would accidentally add a lot of duplicates since I'd add a single and then forget to delete it once the album came out. This was more my issue, though. I also do not like how many songs are moved over to compilations if their album or single version is deleted.
The past is the future
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To start, I'll say that I have no issue with piracy. Be careful with it, though. It's also a lot easier in certain ways than it used to be since there are more resources, but also a lot more difficult in other ways since most of these resources get shut down quickly There are also a lot of smaller audio players you can buy that don't cost too much and still give you an microSD card limit of 256GB-2TB, allowing you to have a lot of music stored on them. You can also setup a NAS (Network-attached Service) and a home system pretty easily now with the help of things like Plex, Navidrome, and Jellyfin.
I'll start with home servers. I don't think many people are equipped or have enough money to actually run their own servers 24/7. If you really want to make your own equivalent of a streaming service, you need a computer or NAS reading your system constantly so that it can send the information to your phone. If there's a power outage or any sort of other issue with it, then you can't access your own files. It's also expensive to buy extra space as well as servers, and the power needed will also raise your light bill. It seems great in theory, but it is difficult and costly in practice. It does give you a lot of power, though. Also, hard drives and solid state drives are expensive now and have a shelf life, so you'd need to constantly rotate them or you'll lose your data. Also, if you want the best quality music, it takes a lot of space. Even 320kps mp3s and m4as take space, even if it is 1/3 of a flac file, so you need to have engouh storage on your computer, external drive, or NAS system to hold music depending on how much you have. I also never figured out how to get Jellyfin's server to work on my phone, but that might be my own issue. I had Flex working on my phone (until the disk on my external hard drive died and I lost my flac files), but I found that it would put a lot of music under the wrong artist for some reason, even if I scanned for tags multiple times. It would also replace the album art with a distorted chimera of two or three different covers. The nice thing was that you could right-click and edit any image or data yourself, including the artist images, but Plex read over 500 songs incorrectly, even though I had all my metadata correct, and it showed up on Musicbee (and later Rufin) correctly.
If you do buy your own audio player and have your own purchased/downloaded music, then you might be set. I will say of the DAPs I've tried, most of the higher-end ones like FiiO and iBasso do sound amazing due to the DACs (digital-to-analog converters) plus amps, but they were made from glass so they cracked easily. I've used a Hiby R1 for a while; the best way I can explain it is that DAC is not great while wired. It could be because it lacks an amp, so it stays quiet. You can also hear that it's converting digital signals to analog so the music tends to sound compressed in weird ways at time, especially the cymbals and bass, which even with flac files begin to sound tinny and lossy. This might have just been my experience. I will say that my old iPod sounded better than the hiby R1, which is pretty sad. It's also really fragile, and the screen protector scratched up easily, while my iPod lasted two decades. You can also easily open up and mod an iPod, but that's its own expense.
I do think that having your own library can be really interesting since it forces you to listen to the music you enjoy. Maybe you've outgrown some or maybe you rediscover a classic you haven't heard in a while. I think that it's all about intentionality, and you can have the same feeling with streaming. I won't stop anyone who goes this route but just know that is expensive.
As mentioned, I've done away with streaming for now. I think if I go back, I'd either use Apple Music or Tidal. For the time being, I use Bandcamp to follow artists I like who post there and use some other websites that I can't mention to listen to new albums. I use my Hiby to listen to songs I've already purchased/downloaded, but I find the lack of search, queue, etc. (something you can mod into an iPod with Rockbox) to make its use very limited, so I think my next step is to buy a better player. The other issue I have is space. With my external hard drive dying on me, it's been hard to get my library again, especially since I can no longer use flac files since I don't have the space. I think 320kps mp3s sound fine, but there is still distortion in the highs and bass, and I just want to know I'm listening to the best quality. This could be my own issue. I do recommend checking out Bandcamp Radio, Radiooo, and using the free stations on Apple Music if you don't want to pay a monthly subscription fee but still want to discover new music. Feel free to reach out to me to discuss other services you can use too. I hope this guide has been helpful!