

However, most people pick a streaming service and stick with it for years and years. When it comes to listening to music, you can always upgrade your headphones or speaker system. Subscriptions help fund the work we do every day. com and our print magazine (if you'd like). Special offer for Gear readers: Get a 1-year subscription to WIRED for $5 ($25 off). We've noted artists who have requested that their songs be removed from Spotify over the Joe Rogan controversy, and we've added information about Spotify's lossless HiFi tier. Tidal Access has been replaced by Tidal Free, and Apple Music introduced a strange new tier-the Apple Music Voice Plan-as well. Updated February 2022: Our top picks now have 80 to 90 million songs in their catalogs, up from 60 to 70 million in mid-2021. Be sure to check out our many other buying guides, including the Best Wireless Headphones, Best Wirefree Earbuds, and Best Cheap Headphones. We put ’em all to the test, and these are our favorites. Most of them have free tiers, but the experience improves if you subscribe and pay a monthly fee. The things that separate streaming services today are the quality of music discovery-whether it's based on algorithms or human curation-the user experience on desktop and mobile apps, what devices you can use them with, and their sound quality. You shouldn't have much trouble finding your favorite artist on any of them. Nowadays, these services’ libraries all look pretty much the same, offering mirror-image catalogs of millions of songs and playlists, and they generally all release new albums at the same time. For example, Taylor Swift might have been on Apple Music but not on Spotify Tidal was originally weighted toward hip hop. Choosing a music streaming service used to be much more complicated.
