4 Best Music Streaming Services (2025): Spotify, Apple Music, and more

Spotify has the best music discovery algorithms and the smoothest and fastest user interface. It leads me down rabbit holes to find new artists and old favorites, based on what I’ve already liked and listened to on the app.

The free tier, with ads, defaults to a low-quality streaming bitrate of 96kbps, but you can bump that up to 160kbps. For $12 per month (an increase of $1 from the last time we updated this story in January 2024), the premium tier gets rid of ads entirely and streams at up to 320 kilobits per second, which is standard streaming quality these days. These are the bit rates of the application; The web player gives you speeds of 128 Kbps and 256 Kbps respectively.

Spotify Lossless Library was announced on February 2021is finally starting to appear September 2025it supports music up to 24-bit at 44.1kHz – although as I write this, most lossless songs are 16-bit at 44.1kHz. Not every user has access yet, but the mobile and desktop app will notify you with the splash screen when you’re invited, or you can check your audio quality settings to see if you have the option to opt-in. In the desktop app, you can click the “Lossless” tag below a track while it’s playing to see details.

Spotify allows you to add an unlimited number of songs to your personal library. As a long-requested feature, the 10,000 song limit is gone, and you can now add an unlimited number of songs to each playlist. If you turn on social sharing, you can see what your friends are listening to and create sessions where the group streams a playlist at the same time. There’s an option on each artist page to listen to only their songs you’ve liked, which is a very welcome change from previous years.

The way Spotify brings together albums, compilations, and songs in one place — with the option to separate them — is much more seamless and convenient than the old setup, which forced you to view them all separately, all the time. Playlists and albums have their own shuffle buttons, which is a nice touch that lets you know when you’re in shuffle mode and when you’re listening to everything in order.