Is Spotify the Best Music Streaming App? We Put Them All to the Test

As an avid Spotify user, my goal was to see which music streaming apps could challenge Spotify. So I began by searching for the highest-rated and most popular apps on the market. Once I found the top 10, I downloaded them onto my phone and began testing them over 10 days. 

I spent anywhere from 30-90 minutes a day testing the apps and used them when I was working, going for a walk, doing chores, or working out. I wanted to see if these apps could offer me the same level of service as Spotify, or even beat it. 

As far as criteria, I looked at how easy the apps were to use, what the design was like, how many songs were available and the diversity of content, what the sound quality was like, and if they had the same type of playlist capabilities and social settings that Spotify has. 

With so many of the apps having such huge catalogs, I tested this too. I searched for a range of content from across different musical genres, and on the apps that had them, I did the same thing with podcasts. Once I’d found the content I wanted, I used the apps in the same way I use Spotify. Due to current restrictions, this is mainly when I go walking/running, do chores or cook, and work out at home.

Their free plan keeps users active on the app and happy to interact with their service, even if it does involve ads and only limited features, but their wide selection of music and straightforward functionality keep people coming back.

When you take a closer look at what Spotify can do, especially with its $9.99 "premium plan," it’s easy to see why so many people love it.

That isn’t always a bad thing, and it’s certainly great to be able to find new talent, but what we love about Spotify is when they say they have 50 million tracks available, you know you’re going to be able to find your song.

The music discovery system is incredible, and its ability to find awesome playlists that it knows you’ll love is a great feature that makes the entire listening experience so much more enjoyable.

One that not only makes it easy for you to listen to the music that you love but one that can help your friends to feel included in the party.

However, if you're just using your app, you’ll still be able to enjoy a great experience, as the Spotify app is very well designed, extremely easy to use, and perhaps the best app out of all the ones we tested, which is just another reason why it came out on top.

One surprising snag to us was audio quality. To be honest, we were blown away by how much better the audio quality was on TIDAL. It’s not something you often notice as most apps have a similar level of sound, but once we heard how good TIDAL was, everything else was simply a step below. 

Right now the only thing stopping TIDAL from moving up is that, for higher-quality sound, you’d need to pay double the price of Spotify. If Spotify were to increase their audio quality to at least step above the majority of the competition, we feel that would be a huge win and a way to keep them firmly on top. Outside of this, there’s not much more they can do. It’s a great app and fantastic service and one that we think deserves its place at the top of this list.

Like Spotify, the premium plan costs $9.99, and once you’re signed up, you get many of the same features available on Spotify.

Once you’ve signed up with Apple Music, you will be able to share your playlists with friends and family, as well as see what they’re listening to, and you even get access to original shows and concerts, as well as access to live radio shows.

Apple does a great job of finding great playlists for you using its intelligent recommendations system, which is very useful if you don’t like spending your time searching for tracks yourself.

If you’re on Android, you should stick to Spotify.

The more expensive TIDAL plan is called "HiFi," and it’ll set you back $19.99 a month. However, if you’re really into your music and you appreciate good quality, that fee may well be worth it. The Hi-Res sound is far superior to anything that Spotify can produce, and the difference in sound quality is noticeable as you can access millions of Hi-Res tracks at 24-bit/192kHz.

When you look at the actual TIDAL app, you quickly realize that they didn’t throw all their money at getting the best quality sound, but that they’ve also developed a pretty great app. In many ways, they’ve used a similar format to Spotify, and quite frankly, we love it.

It makes total sense to produce something that is proven to work and that people are already familiar with, and in this case, we think it’s a good idea.

The TIDAL app is easy to navigate, extremely user-friendly, and very well designed. Overall it’s a great app and one that music lovers should certainly consider.

If we’re being completely honest, the idea of using Youtube solely as a music app does feel weird, but it does a great job, and we’re sure it’s going to make waves in this area in the future. Right now though, it just missed the cut in terms of usability, features, and sound quality.

With over 40 million titles available and sound quality as impressive as TIDAL’S, Amazon music is great. However, where it fell down was with the variety of music available. We struggled to find some songs that we searched for, which was a surprise given how many titles the app actually has.

Pandora is a classic and still a good choice for those who really just want to throw on a certain music genre without giving much thought to picking a playlist or queuing up the right songs. That being said, the other more versatile streamers had better "radio" options, in our opinion, making them more worth the price than Pandora's $4.99/mo ad-free service. The free service with ads is frankly annoying enough not to be worth it.

We enjoyed using the Deezer app, it was easy to use and the set up was straightforward. We also loved how you could tailor your musical tastes and get the content that you like. However, if there was an area we’d like to see improved it would be the podcasts available on the app as we couldn’t find the ones we wanted.

Soundcloud is a good app, but not quite premium quality. It has a selection of music available, mostly from independent or small artists, and sitting at over 125 million total. However, we don’t feel it’s ready to challenge the big names in music streaming just yet.

We found the Bandcamp app quite cluttered and felt the interface could have been smoother. It does a decent job of helping you to find the music you like, but it’s no threat to the big names in music streaming yet.

LiveXLive allows users to create and share customized music stations. Unfortunately, we had had difficulty getting the app to work for us at all. We’ll have to check back in on this one in the future and see how it stacks up.