Now that Apple Music and Tidal have jumped into an already crowded party, the battle for streaming music domination is now more heated than ever. Each service has its own unique set of pros and cons.
As a service to The Oracle's readers, we’ve created the following post to help determine which streaming music service is right for you
APPLE MUSIC
- Like Spotify, Apple music offers millions of streaming songs, on demand.
- After a three-month free trial, the service will cost you $10 per month, or $15 per month for a family plan that accommodates up to six members.
- Apple music boasts hand-curated playlists.
- A place for artists to post videos and pics.
- You can store as many as 25,000 songs in the cloud.
- If you don’t sign up for Apple Music, you can still access limited playlists, as well as music stored on your device.
- The Curators tab offers playlists chosen from a variety of third parties, including GQ, Rolling Stone, Shazam, and several others.
- Beats 1 radio is a 24-hour live station that broadcasts to 100 countries from LA, NYC, and London.
- “My Music” is designed to meld all of your purchased music, as well as those you’ve “ripped from CDs” with any music you can find in Apple Music’s catalog of over 30 million tracks.
- Connect is essentially just a clipboard for artists you listen to, save, and favorite. It's a place where artists share an entirely new side of their work directly with you. See and hear videos, audio, and more.
Spotify
- Spotify integrates with Facebook to connect with your friends and see what they are listening to.
- Spotify recommends artists that you'd like based on what you listen to.
- It also has a radio feature.
- It has 3rd party apps that both enhance and bog down the experience.
- Has access to 30 Million Songs For streaming.
- There is a native app for Windows (and also one for Mac), so you don't have to have your browser open, like you do with Google.
- There is a free, limited version.
- A premium account will set you back about $10 USD/mo.
- It does allow you to add your own music to the system, but it's not as seamless as Google and Apple
Google Play Music All Access
- Same price point (approximately $10 USD/mo) as Spotify And Apple Music.
- They give you a boat load of space to store your own mp3s, up to 50,000 songs at a maximum of 300mb per song. This also allows people to add the more obscure songs to the system for their listening pleasure.
- You can quickly view the YouTube video of the song you're listening to via the app or via the web interface.
- Another great feature is the radio. Although not quite as good as Pandora, Google's music functionality is quite good.
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Tidal
- Tidal Premium matches Spotify's Premium price of 9.99 per month and offers music at the same bitrate - 320kbps. That's lossy but still not too bad compared to an MP3 at a lower bitrate.
- To get the "lossless high fidelity", you'll still need to shell out 19.99 a month for a "Tidal HiFi" membership.
- Tidal sort of looks just like Spotify.
- It's got an excellent Chrome-based web player and a desktop player for PCs as well as decent iOS and Android apps.
- It offers comprehensive playlist functionality, sharing of music as well as offline listening. And the library is off to a good start, now with well over 25 million tracks. We regularly noticed holes in Tidal's library when we first reviewed it but these days things are looking a lot more healthy.
- instead of only serving up compressed music formats like MP3 and OGG – as do Spotify, Google Play Music and most of the others – Tidal offers music at CD quality.
- Offers playlists and recommendations curated by experienced music journalists, Plus 75,000 music videos.
- The Chrome-based web player is visually very similar to Spotify, with a homescreen that offers links to curated playlists and recommended hi-fi albums as well as top 20 charts.
- A simple click on the sidebar will take you to your 'My Music' area where you'll find all your stuff. And browsing music is very easy.
- Search generally isn't terribly smart - misspell an album or artist name even by one character or one piece of punctuation, and you'll be left with zero results.
- If you're a fan of the 'radio' function on Google Play Music or Spotify, you'll find an identical service ready and waiting in Tidal. You can select Artist radio or individual track radio, and it's a great way to discover new music.
- In the settings, you can connect Tidal to Facebook which will allow you to share music with your friends. You can also extract a URL if you want to link someone to any album, playlist or track.
- Sound quality is a lot better than Spotify and the other music streaming services. Hi-fi enthusiasts don't need to be convinced about the benefits of FLAC over MP3 or OGG.
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What music streaming service do you use? Post your thoughts in the comments below.
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