We check out the best places to get your music…
As any sound-system buff will tell you, it’s no good having featurepacked audio equipment at your disposal if you haven’t got the music to make it worthwhile. In the past, that might have meant a wall full of CDs or even a killer MP3 collection. These days, though? It tends to mean an internet connection and a streaming music service with thousands of tracks available on demand.
Subscription-based streaming services have fast replaced audio downloads as the medium of choice for songsters everywhere. But with loads of different services to choose from, where do you even start? We’ve rounded up and compared some of the most popular so you don’t have to.
Spotify
By some distance the most popular streaming service around, Spotify is very much the model that other companies have to either beat or circumvent. Since it’s been around for over half a decade now, Spotify’s biggest advantage – other than its library of more than 30 million tracks – is its support for virtually every platform you can imagine. As newcomers like Tidal struggle to launch on both new and older devices, you can guarantee Spotify has already planted its flag there.
In terms of quality, Spotify is at the bottom end of the spectrum. Its free service offers music at just 160kbps, which is considerably worse than most commercially sold digital music, and the premium service is still only 320kbps – far lower than the CD-quality audio offered by audiophile-focused services. This makes Spotify a casual choice that isn’t necessarily aimed at those with high-end audio equipment, but that hasn’t stopped it being hugely popular.
There are two main tiers for Spotify. The free, ad-supported version has some limits, such as the inability to listen offline or skip more than five tracks in a row on the mobile version. The Premium version (£9.99 a month), in addition to higherquality audio, is ad-free, drops any listening restrictions and also has a small number of exclusive albums unavailable to free users. The family plan allows other household users to get 50% off a premium subscription.
Verdict: The only downside is the quality. But only extreme audiophiles will notice.
Tidal
This lossless streaming audio service is backed by a number of big-name artists, including U2, Coldplay and Jay-Z. Its selling point – beyond the fact that the bulk of the money made goes to artists rather than their labels and licensors – is that they offer lossless audio, meaning CD-quality sound.
There are two packages: Tidal Premium, which offers standard sound quality for £9.99 a month, and Tidal HiFi, which offers lossless sound for £19.99 a month. Both of these packages carry discounts if you pay for six months in advance in advance, and if you want to share the account between different members of one family, you can do that by paying around £5 per person extra on the standard service, or £10 per person extra on the premium one, up to a maximum of four extra people.
The service claims to contain 35 million tracks, plus access to 85,000 music videos and extra editorial content. Unlike other services, there’s no free tier, though this also means there isn’t any advertising on the service either. Exclusive content largely comes from artists who back Tidal, such as the advancestream of Kanye West’s new album that the service hosted earlier this month.
Verdict: Ethical profit sharing means high prices, but if you care about quality, it’s a front runner.
Apple Music
Available to anyone, though obviously aimed at those with Apple hardware that can take advantage of it away from the environment of iTunes, Apple Music costs £9.99 a month for access to the full library of 30 million songs and their exclusive editorial content, including the exclusive 24-hour DJ-hosted radio station Beats 1, which has big-name presenters including Zane Lowe. A family account allows six people to share one account for £14.99.
Integration with existing Apple services is supposed to be the selling point, but it’s fair to say that Apple has received criticism for the difficulty users have had navigating the app and organising its content. There’s no free tier worth speaking of, but it is possible to get a three-month trial, so you can at least figure out whether you’ll prefer it to the alternatives. Offline play is possible for paid users. Qualitywise, Apple’s music is encoded at 256kbps, but it uses AAC rather than Spotify’s Ogg Vorbis, so the quality gap is negligible.
The biggest hole in its support right now is, not unsurprisingly, Android – though Apple insists it will support it soon. Regardless, we think you need multiple pieces of Apple hardware to take proper advantage of Apple Music, and if you’re building your home media system around any other brand, then there’s no distinct advantage to be found here.
Verdict: Poor multi-platform support and fiddly software don’t offset the exclusive content.
Google Play Music
In competition with Apple, Google’s service, Play Music, is free for three months, and then thereafter £9.99 a month. The basic features are fairly standard: support for Android and iOS devices, a web player, and 35 million tracks to choose from. But there is at least one excellent feature, which is that you can add up to 50,000 of your own tracks to online storage, which can then be streamed anywhere. That way, if your favourite music isn’t available in the streaming database, you don’t have to upload it to loads of devices. Indeed, this feature is even available on the free tier (which doesn’t give you streaming access).
If you do pay, you get the chance to curate your own radio station, ad-free listening, offline download and access to the full library of songs.
There’s also a family plan available (although it’s not particularly easy to find), which allows six people to stream music on up to ten devices for £14.99 a month, which is quite good by any standards. Of all the services here, we think it’s the best alternative to Spotify if you’re looking for an alternative, though it doesn’t have support that’s quite as wide.
Verdict: If anything, its features are even better than Spotify, but it just doesn’t quite have the device support (and, let’s be honest, marketing) behind it.
Deezer
A French company that has been active since 2007, Deezer has the requisite 35 million tracks in its library and offers three subscription tiers: Discover, which is free 128kbps audio with ads, a limited number of skips, no offline mode and no chromecast support; Premium, which is £9.99 a month with all of those features available and 320kbps audio; and Elite, which is £14.99 a month and offers lossless audio (1411kbps) with an offline mode, but is only available on Sonos systems. If you pay up-front for 12 months, it only costs the equivalent of £9.99 a month, however.
In addition to its music catalogue, Deezer offers access to a huge number of news and entertainment shows including live football commentary thanks to a deal with TalkSport. The web player supports PCs and Macs, and there are apps available for all major platforms including Logitech and Sonos sound systems, smart TVs and even in-car computers.
Verdict: Low-quality audio on the free plan coupled with confusing restrictions on the expensive ones make Deezer hard to recommend.