The Best Online Music Streaming Services for 2025

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At a glance, the streaming music field is saturated with seemingly interchangeable services and similar functions. Open an app, press play, and enjoy sweet tunes. However, a deeper dive reveals that many of the highest-rated streaming music apps have distinguishing features that make them unique. Each service is appealing in its way, so selecting the best streaming music service is more challenging than you'd think. We've tested the category's notable names for over a decade to help you narrow your choices with our top picks, which include Apple Music, Spotify, and SiriusXM Internet Radio.

The Best Music Streaming Quality

Most streaming music services have some base-level commonality, such as letting you create customizable channels, but a handful stand out from the very crowded pack due to their unique feature sets. For example, Amazon Music Unlimited, Primephonic, Qobuz, and Tidal pride themselves on sound quality, delivering premium Hi-Res Audio tunes that feature uncompressed audio that surpasses your typical music stream. Considering that most online music services' streams are in the compressed 128Kbps to 320Kbps range, this trend is impressive. You'll need audiophile-quality headphones or top-notch speakers to truly appreciate the musical richness.

The Best Free Music Streaming Services

Some services, such as LiveOne and Spotify, have free options that let you try before you subscribe, while others, such as Apple Music, are strictly premium experiences (typically starting at the $10-per-month mark). Many services have lyrics, too, so you can sing along, word-for-word, with your favorite song. In addition, family plans, a relatively recent industry feature, let up to six household members sign up for a shared premium account for $14.99 per month, depending on the service.

There are many differences between the free and paid streaming music tiers in most services. Free accounts typically limit your ability to skip songs to just six per hour, and they feed you ads in either audio or video form. The free tiers are for more casual listeners or people who don't find it worth spending a dime on music. Premium accounts, however, offer unlimited song skips, on-demand playback, and other goodies. The for-pay levels of service are aimed at customers who really want to explore the depths of what a streaming music service offers.

In addition, each of the reviewed services offers mobile apps, so you needn't be tied to your PC to enjoy tunes. A valuable feature that you'll find in these services' mobile apps is the ability to cache music for offline playback, a feature generally reserved for premium subscribers. This is a technological godsend for commuters or folks who are frequently in locations that have spotty signal coverage.

You'll find even greater streaming audio diversity should you dig deeper into the space. LiveOne, for example, differentiates itself with Stories, a hosted program that features interesting tales, ranging from love to horror. Tidal sells concert and sports tickets and has an expert editorial staff that produces feature-length articles. Amazon Music Unlimited lets you upload your own audio files and stream them along with the songs in the company's catalog. Most services have a robust selection of comedy albums. Video game music is yet another trendy audial avenue to explore, and many of these services feature an extensive collection of game soundtracks to add to your playlist. There's a lot of content to explore beyond simple music.

Which Streaming Service Has the Best Music?

Unfortunately, all isn't swell in this musical wild west. Thanks to—you guessed it—money, some platforms have either gained or lost content. Taylor Swift, Prince, and other artists have seen their catalogs vanish from streaming platforms (and later reappear) due to low royalties. The issue of artist compensation has always dogged the recording industry, and it hasn't disappeared with the advent of streaming music—quite the contrary, in fact.

Tidal aimed to stand out from the crowd, as a platform built on the idea of properly paying artists. It was also the only service to host Prince's catalog for a hot minute (though that's no longer the case). In some cases, you're unable to play particular songs on demand; those tracks are only available within the scope of a themed channel. Content restrictions and missing artists and tracks are still a problem in the space, though—Swift notwithstanding—the situation has improved markedly in recent years. And Google sent yet another service to the graveyard when it replaced Google Play Music with YouTube Music.

Trying to figure out where things live and how you're able to access them can prove quite vexing to the uninitiated. It's one of the entertainment challenges that we face in the digital age.

The Right Music Streaming Service for You

Thankfully, you don't need to wade through the numerous services to find the one that best suits your listening needs. PCMag has reviewed both popular and niche streaming music services to separate the musical wheat from the auditory chaff. Whether you’re curious about a particular service, or just want to know how Spotify stacks up to Tidal, take a look at the reviews above or the chart below to discover what streaming music services are best suited to your listening tastes.

If you're curious about why certain streaming music services aren't featured in this story, here's the skinny. It's very likely they've been surpassed by the 10 superior services highlighted here, absorbed by a rival, or gone out of business. For example, AOL Radio is no more, and Rdio sold its tech to Pandora. We expect to see more shakeouts in the space in the next few years, as there are so many players providing broadly similar services.

If you're concerned about streaming your favorite tunes over, say, a Starbucks Wi-Fi signal, you need to get yourself a VPN. A virtual private network safeguards your mobile devices from snoopers and, depending on the location of the VPN server, may let you access music licensed to other regions. Using a VPN to get around licensing restrictions probably violates Spotify's terms of service, though, so tread carefully.

Mike Williams contributed to this article.