Which Music Streaming Platform is Actually the Best?

One thing almost every teenager has in common is that they listen to music, but where and how they do this varies from person to person. Some prefer listening to physical copies of music such as CDs or records, but mostly music is consumed via digital streaming platforms. Although the debate over Spotify vs. Apple Music is the most widely known, every platform has its own pros and cons.

TIDAL is a music streaming platform that isn’t as popular as Spotify or Apple Music, but it has plenty of unique features that help it stand out from the crowd. One main selling point is that it boasts some of the best audio quality on the market. Even as a casual listener, there is a noticeable difference between TIDAL and Spotify. TIDAL also prioritizes supporting artists, partly by offering TIDAL RISING, where, according to their website, “artists can access educational tools, industry connections, potential playlist opportunities, and more.” Artists can also become a “TIDAL RISING ambassador, which includes funding and direct access to the TIDAL team to help artists take their careers to the next level.”

TIDAL has music videos embedded into the app, so you can look up a song and watch the music video for it while it plays. This isn’t as easy as I would hope, however, due to the minimalist app design. While TIDAL can be a nice break from staring at the rather cluttered home page that most streaming platforms have, its simplicity makes it confusing and difficult to navigate given all the different features it offers. Exclusive content is great, but only if you can find it! TIDAL is $10.99 a month, with a student plan available for $5.49 a month. Beware that if you sign up through your iPhone, then the price gets significantly more expensive. Due to the commission they pay Apple, it raises to $13.99 a month. This can be avoided by using your computer to sign up, and although there is a family plan, there is no free version. 

Like TIDAL, Apple Music delivers on audio quality. It’s comparable to TIDAL, offering lossless audio and spatial audio, meaning the audio file is less compressed and more immersive, allowing it to sound better. Like most major streaming platforms, Apple Music has a catalog of over 100 million songs, and they all feature Apple Music Sing. This helps you to sing along with songs by showing you beat-by-beat lyrics. Its interface is clean and easy to navigate, and they recently started doing Apple Music Replay, a monthly music recap. Eleanor Raspone, an Apple Music user, says that “generally finding music is easy, and Apple makes good recommendations,” although in her opinion, she wishes it was easier to find music through other people’s playlists because that’s something she “really love[s] about Spotify.”

One downside to Apple Music is that unlike Spotify and Amazon Music, Apple Music does not have audiobooks or podcasts built into the app. Instead, Apple has Apple Podcasts and Apple Books as separate entities. Price-wise, Apple Music is $10.99 a month or $5.99 a month for a student plan, and like TIDAL, there is no free option. 

Pandora is a streaming platform that differs from the others in a key way; it is much more like listening to the radio than to a service. Freely searching for whatever song you want is a feature that is unavailable on the free version of Pandora, is allowed limitedly by watching ads with Pandora Plus, and is unlimited with Pandora Premium. Their song catalog is seemingly also smaller than the other platforms. While an exact number is not available, according to a blog post from Camilo Landau, a music analyst at Pandora, it is somewhere in the “tens of millions.” 

In terms of sound quality, Pandora’s is the worst on this list, topping out at 192 kilobits per second (kbps) as compared to Spotify’s max of 320 kbps. One thing Pandora does have is something they call MGP2, a system that closely dissects and analyzes songs in order to create lists of similar songs or albums. This is the technology they use to recommend music and help run their music stations and playlists, and it also allows them to add an interesting “features of this song” section under any song you play. 

Pandora Premium is $12.99 a month, and along with being able to search for any song you want, it offers no ads, unlimited skips, the ability to download music and make playlists, and also podcasts. Pandora Plus is the same except with limited downloads and no playlists. It is $5.99 a month, making it slightly less expensive than Pandora Premium with the 50% student discount.

YouTube Music comes with YouTube Premium, making it a good option for people who already subscribe to that. The app incorporates aspects of normal YouTube into it, allowing users to watch music videos complete with comments and likes. It also has a “Samples” page that plays clips of music videos in a similar format to YouTube Shorts, acting as a way to discover new music. This page also includes a button that takes you directly to YouTube Shorts, something users may either enjoy or find distracting from the music. 

In terms of organization, YouTube Music user Indie Becker says that “its user interface isn’t as good as most other [streaming platforms],” and she only uses it because she doesn’t have to pay for it. For her, it is important to have “clear organization of music and [an] easy [way] to search [for] songs and artists,” so, she will probably “switch back to Spotify pretty soon.”

One thing I noticed was that while you can make playlists, if you want your page to be aesthetic, you can’t use your own photo for the cover. You have to use an AI-generated image that the app helps you make. In terms of price, YouTube Music Premium is $10.99 a month on its own or $5.49 a month for the student plan. It does have a free version which has ads and lower audio quality, and you are unable to download anything or listen to music in the background of your device. On the other hand, it is one of the few free music platforms that gives you unlimited skips and the ability to pick any track you like. 

In comparison, Amazon Music is not so generous. Although a version of Amazon Music comes with Amazon Prime, “to be able to play any song you want, you have to pay for an additional unlimited subscription,” says Ruby Rippetoe-Crawford. “They also have some songs that you can’t listen to at all unless you buy that unlimited version.” She does say that when she was using Amazon Music, the “sound quality was overall good,” and she “[felt] like she could hear” the difference between it and Spotify. Although, she doesn’t know if she “would notice a difference without already knowing [the music is less compressed].” 

Amazon Music Unlimited costs $9.99 a month for Prime members or $10.99 a month for everyone else, and comes with spatial audio and ultra HD audio comparable to Apple Music. Similarly to TIDAL, purchasing a subscription through your iPhone will raise the monthly amount to $11.99 a month, so watch out for that. Included in this membership price is one free audiobook a month from a catalog they offer, but if you have Audible, they will also display books you own on there, despite still forcing you to go to Audible to listen to the book.

I noticed three main downsides to Amazon Music, the first and most frivolous being that aesthetically it is not cute, and you can’t change the covers of your playlists at all. Secondly, the app will try to sell you merch related to the song you are listening to, and the links don’t lead to the artist’s page — of course, they lead to Amazon. In terms of supporting artists, this seems sketchy, and I would hope that paying for an ad-free platform would mean, well, no ads. Thirdly, there is no way to listen to other people’s playlists; users are limited to Amazon’s and their own. “This is definitely a downfall,” says Rippetoe-Crawford. There is “a social aspect to music streaming services that you miss out on with Amazon Music.”

Social aspects in streaming services bring us right around to Spotify, the largest streaming platform in the world, according to MIDiA Research, a research company focused on the digital content economy. As a platform it is, as Astrid Robin puts it, “very user friendly,” and she likes that she “can make playlists and share them with [her] friends.” 

Spotify stands out for the personalized playlists it creates for users. One example of this is the Daylist, which changes several times a day and is called things such as “laid back British invasion evening.” While these playlists do a good job of showcasing the music you like, Robin feels they can be “repetitive,” making it “hard to discover new music.” On the other hand, Becker loves the personalized playlists from Spotify, so it really depends on what you want from them. If you want to find new music on Spotify, Raspone loves how “easy it is to find new music through other people’s playlists” because you can look at anyone’s playlists, not just your own or your mutuals’.

The audio quality on Spotify is the main downside to the platform; it goes up to 320 kbps but does not have lossless or spatial audio, meaning that for audiophiles, it may not be the best option. Robin “love[s] to listen to modern music on Spotify,” but prefers “the sound quality of records for older music, probably because it was recorded with the intention of being played on vinyl.” 

Spotify Jam is a feature that allows multiple users on Spotify to listen to music together over a distance, all controlling the queue and what songs are playing. This is a feature that Apple Music also has a version of called SharePlay, which acts pretty much the same, and TIDAL has Live Sessions, where one person controls all the music, but multiple people can listen at the same time. This is a good example of how Spotify promotes the social aspects of music, but nothing is better evidence than Spotify Wrapped.

Spotify Wrapped has a chokehold on music fans. Its release is eagerly awaited every year, and although other platforms have attempted to create similar things, nothing is as popular as Spotify Wrapped. Spotify’s many podcasts and audiobooks make it convenient for listeners to find whatever they want, and the only form of media Spotify doesn’t have is music videos. Also, I’ll point out that you can customize the covers of your playlists with whatever you want. At $11.99 a month or $5.99 a month for the student plan, Spotify is comparable in price to other music platforms. The free version has ads, limited skips, and limitations on playing albums or playlists in order.

All of these platforms have positives and negatives; it’s easy to see why Spotify is so popular, but if you are someone who really cares about music quality, then TIDAL or Apple Music might be a better option. If you already have YouTube Premium then you automatically have YouTube Music, and if you have Amazon Prime, Amazon Music Prime has more available for listeners than most free services. Whatever music platform you use, hopefully, this article was helpful.