David Pierce reports in the Wall Street Journal:
Streaming is the future of music. Frankly, it’s the present: Services like Spotify and Apple Music already account for nearly two-thirds of the music industry’s revenue. Rather than buying one song or an album at a time, most people choose to pay about $10 a month for unlimited access to tens of millions of tracks. Whichever streaming service you choose will take over: It’ll play your favorites, suggest playlists and learn all about your tastes. But lots of them have pretty much everything now. So how do you pick?
Streaming is the future of music. Frankly, it’s the present: Services like Spotify and Apple Music already account for nearly two-thirds of the music industry’s revenue. Rather than buying one song or an album at a time, most people choose to pay about $10 a month for unlimited access to tens of millions of tracks.
So much for the cassette comeback.
If you haven’t already put your CD sleeves in the closet, now’s the time. Streaming services offer more music and far better tools to find and play it. You can use a voice assistant to search for songs or tune into playlists created specifically to match your tastes. With a few taps, you can soundtrack your workout or your workday. You can discover a giant world of music you might never have found, even browsing the best record store.
Which streaming service should you use, though? You want to make the right choice because whichever you choose will take over: It’ll play your favorites, suggest playlists and learn all about your tastes. But it’s not like you can just pick the one that has “Stairway to Heaven”—lots of them have pretty much everything now. So how do you pick?
For starters, there are many players in the music-streaming space, yet only four true contenders exist: Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and Google’s new YouTube Music. All four offer huge libraries of songs and are accessible almost everywhere.
The popular Pandora isn’t on my list because everything it offers—radio and on-demand streaming—is done better elsewhere.
Among the big four, no service stands clearly above the rest. Each has advantages over the competition, as well as serious deficiencies. Here’s how they compare across the five features that make up a great music service.
The Price
All four services are shockingly similar: $10 a month for a single user and $15 for a family of as many as six people. If you’re already an Amazon Prime member (which you likely are), you can get the full Amazon Music experience for $8 a month, or a smaller library for no additional cost. All but Apple Music offer ad-supported free versions, too, with limited features.
The Content
I know, I said they all have roughly the same song library. But each service does offer some exclusive content.
Apple Music scores points for its Beats 1 radio station, which frequently offers exclusive interviews and guest DJ sets from famous artists. Apple also lets you combine your local library with its streaming selection.
YouTube Music does even better: It not only hosts all the songs you’re looking for, but countless music videos, remixes, covers and live performances that already live on YouTube. YouTube Music doesn’t integrate that stuff into the app especially well, but no other service can touch its overall library.
The Curation
Since an effectively infinite library seems a bit time-consuming to comb through, all four services attempt to help you find something to listen to. Think of them like Fonzie hitting the jukebox for you. All four have workout playlists and songs for singing in the car, and often suggest them at exactly the right time. Apple has an excellent playlist of personalized weekly new releases called New Music Mix, but Spotify takes it to another level: Its algorithmically generated playlists like Discover Weekly and Daily Mix offer hours of music new and old curated just for you.
The Apps
It must be hard to build a great music app because nobody seems able to do it. Spotify is slow to load and complicated to use, burying basic features deep inside menus. YouTube Music has a great web app, but doesn’t offer features as simple as alphabetically sorting your library. Apple Music looks great on the iPhone (and Android!), but on a Mac, it only works inside the bloated iTunes app.
Amazon’s mobile app is my favorite, thanks to its clean interface and simple layout, but it’s awful on the web. Voice assistants have made these apps less important, because you can just ask for whatever you want, but services should spend more time improving their apps.
The Ecosystem
A music service only works when you can use it. In that sense, your choice might already be made for you. Got an iPhone and thinking about a HomePod? Get Apple Music and use Siri to control it. If you’re an Alexa household, Amazon Music works best. If you’re starting from scratch, Spotify’s the way to go: It’s practically ubiquitous across devices including Amazon’s Echo speakers, and the Spotify Connect feature makes it easy to control what’s playing—and where—from within the app.
After weeks of testing all four services side by side, I’m still a Spotify user. In part, though, that’s because I’ve been a Spotify user for the better part of a decade. I’ve made hundreds of playlists, spent thousands of hours telling the service what I like and dislike. Spotify knows my music taste better than I do. I’m not in love with the product so much as I am inextricably grafted to it.
If you’re already a music streamer, there’s little to entice you to switch allegiances. YouTube Music, the newest entrant, has a couple of neat features, like a constantly updated “Offline mixtape” that makes sure you always have fresh tracks available for the subway ride. Still, nothing about it makes me want to leave my current setup.
If you’re looking for a way to get into the streaming world, though, Spotify’s the obvious and best choice. It’s the Netflix of music; available almost everywhere, filled with great content, endlessly clever in the ways it helps you find stuff to watch. I wish it worked with Siri, but the in-app voice search works OK when I’m in the car.
This race among music services is far from over, though. It won’t be decided by the largest library or the most exclusive content—or even the best app. It’s a battle of intelligence: curation and personalization, voice recognition and search. It’s a battle to be the one who responds when you turn to your speakers and shout, “Play me some music!"
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