7 Best Music Streaming Platforms

Music is part of our daily lives.

At home, on the road, at work, to accompany our parties and cozy evenings, our playlists are there.

But the time when we downloaded our songs one by one to put them on our portable players is over!

Now, streaming platforms have taken over, all with specificities that differentiate them from their competitors.

Among the following seven platforms, let’s see which one will suit you best by reviewing their advantages and disadvantages.

Best Music Streaming Platforms

1. Spotify: The leader in music streaming

If you’re a music lover, you’re probably familiar with Spotify: the leading music streaming service has an impressive library of tracks, and plenty of other tricks up its sleeve too!

On Spotify, you can listen to a wide variety of podcasts in every language and on every topic imaginable, enjoy playlists created to suit your tastes including a 30-track discovery playlist every week, stations linked to your favorite tracks, and much, much more.

Plus, the premium subscription at 9.99€ offers you many more doors! The possibility to listen to your tracks without any ads, to listen to the track you want at any time without the shuffle mode or to download your tracks to enjoy your music when you don’t have a connection, all in a well-designed mobile or computer application and web version.

It’s not hard to see why Spotify has taken center stage!

2. Amazon Music HD: The offering that just keeps getting better

Amazon’s empire is constantly expanding, so it was only logical that a music streaming platform would appear.

Amazon has chosen to remain classic for this service and has largely copied the competing platforms, both in terms of interface and options.

In fact, it is especially for Amazon Prime users that this service will prove interesting, as Amazon Music (a sort of free and limited version of Amazon Music HD) is already since 2018 included in the Amazon Prime subscription.

If the limited track offering and 40 hours of ad-free monthly listening leave you wanting more, then it’s time to look into an HD subscription.

3. Deezer: The Little Frenchman

For once, we are not relying on a platform made in the USA or Eastern Europe: Deezer is a French platform now known internationally, a bit older than Spotify.

With two subscription versions including one in CD quality, Deezer is a good service that deserves to be further improved, and the team seems to be working on it, notably by adding many integrations so that the service can be used on a large number of platforms.

4. Youtube Music: The biggest offer

Long awaited, Youtube Music is the 100% music service of the video giant.

Different from Youtube Premium which allows access to all the content of the site without advertising, Youtube Music offers an impressive library, and redirects you to a video if a track is not available on the service.

Unlike other platforms that use only the upload by artists, Youtube Music relies on content already available on Youtube.

Thus, songs posted by anyone can be found there.

Replacing Google Play Music, this service offers a really ideal interface for music with a free version, although limited, and a subscription version.

With a weekly discovery playlist and many thematic playlists updated very regularly, Youtube Music ranks effortlessly among the best.

5. Apple Music: The best choice on iOS

Apple has made us used to it: if you use devices running iOS, Apple’s operating system, such as iPads, iPhones, Macs or HomePods, Apple Music will be the best choice for you because it is perfectly integrated with the brand’s devices.

In fact, it is pre-installed on these devices and controllable by Siri! Thanks to Connect, Apple Music goes a little further than just streaming audio tracks to create a kind of hybrid with a social network that brings together all the positive points of other services.

You will be able to follow your favorite artists and have access to exclusive content.

6. Qobuz: The service for audiophiles

Music is an art, and you intend to treat it with the reverence it deserves.

If you want to enjoy music in its best quality with a service designed for true sound lovers, Qobuz is for you!

With an honorable catalog of more than 70 million tracks, its offer remains relatively limited compared to other services like Spotify or Youtube Music.

However, Qobuz makes up for it with an impressive sound quality!

7. Tidal: Another service for music lovers

Tidal also prides itself on allowing you to listen to your music the way the artist intended: without loss of quality, and in total immersion.

But Tidal goes further: several artists are shareholders of the platform, making it a music streaming platform for artists, by artists, offering them a fairer remuneration.

If the platform has sometimes had a bad press because of exclusivity on some releases, it remains a platform with a large library that offers options such as offline mode, more than 200,000 clips available, but also and especially uncompressed quality.

What criteria to choose your music streaming service?

As you’ve seen, music streaming services are similar in many ways in what they try to achieve: having the largest library, with features that make you want to opt for a paid version, while making sure that their free version remains better than their competitors’.

To choose the service that would be best for you, you can rely on certain criteria: the offer provided by the service, the quality of the experience, the paid subscription options, as well as the personalization and social options, but also the small technical details that can make all the difference.

The proposed offer

Of course, the most important thing is that you can find your favorite artists and their entire discography! So the first thing to do is to check that all your favorite artists and bands are available on the service you are interested in.

But these applications are also about discovery, so the larger the library, the more likely you are to find your future favorite!

Also, if you’re interested in podcasts, you should know that not all applications offer this category of program and stick mostly to music streaming.

The quality of the experience

A streaming service is nothing without a good listening quality and a flawless ergonomics: nobody wants to struggle with his device to simply launch a playlist before making a trip or starting a sport session.

So it’s crucial that the interface is fluid, that managing playlists is simple, that navigating the artist pages and their discography is enjoyable, and that the widget is well done so you can control the player even when the phone is locked.

Of course, the highest quality listening in terms of Kb/s will always win, but beware! It should be followed by a good equalizer for the best experience.

Paid subscription

The principle of the paid subscription is that it gives you more than the free version, when there is one.

It doesn’t matter if you choose to subscribe to eliminate ads, for the offline mode or for a better listening quality as long as you feel you are getting a good deal and especially that the technical support is reactive and communicates about bugs and other changes on the applications.

Customization options

Receiving recommendations specially designed for you and based on your tastes may seem superfluous, but once you’ve tried it, you can’t live without it.

Being able to launch a playlist blindly and knowing in advance that you will enjoy the new tracks and possibly discover artists that will be among your favorites is priceless!

The quality of the recommendations is therefore very important so that you don’t end up with content that doesn’t fit your style at all.

Social options

Music is also a social matter: being able to share your music is very important for many people, so it is necessary to have options to do it easily.

Sharing playlists on any social network, collaborative playlists, recap of favorites from previous years…

Many options are available and will allow you to learn more about your loved ones and to see a retrospective of your musical evolution and all the new tracks you discovered and enjoyed.

The little details

In your relationship with your music streaming service, it’s the little things that make all the difference.

The possibility, for example, to change the sound quality like on Spotify in order to save your mobile data, the possibility to subscribe to your friends’ profiles, the presence of clips, the display of song lyrics, the editorialized playlists, which are therefore made by real team members or even celebrities, and not by an algorithm…

All these additional features can really change your user experience and should be taken into account.

With the months of trials offered by all these platforms, you can see which features are most important to you and make your choice based on which service you enjoyed the most.

Conclusion

While all of these services seem to be fighting over a single audience, companies have quickly realized that they need a strong argument to get out of the game without dramatically lowering their prices.

Huge library, unmatched sound quality, sophisticated sharing options, cutting-edge interface… Each of these services offers a very different experience, so your choice will come down to what’s most important to you when listening to music.

Don’t neglect the emerging platforms: it is thanks to your support that they will be able to start negotiations with labels and thus expand their offer and perfect their player until they become THE service that combines all the positive points mentioned in this top!

All of these services are constantly innovating to bring you the best offer, so keep up to date with the latest news and upcoming features like Spotify’s CD-quality option that can finally tip the scales.