These days, we all have access to the world’s music at our fingertips, but unfortunately, not all music streaming services are equal. Signal reliability – especially when traversing a tunnel – and content availability are obvious low points, but hey, the highs can be just as high. Take high-fidelity streaming for example: out of seven major services we ranked from worst to best, four of them offer the absolute best quality most consumers can get from their tunes.
If audio quality is the main concern for your next big streaming project, you should consider Amazon Music Unlimited, Apple Music, Qobuz, or Tidal. All offer lossless formats to varying degrees, up to 24-bit depth and 192 kHz. Spotify and Deezer also offer Hi-Fi streaming, but with a lower limit of 16-bit or 24-bit/44.1kHz streaming, which nails them to CD quality. YouTube Music only achieves a mediocre bitrate of 256 kbps using a lossy codec. Also, sorry Amazon Prime subscribers, but your Amazon Music Prime add-on doesn’t give you these so-called HD streaming tiers.
What’s the best value I can get from a music streaming service?
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On a purely theoretical comparison of bitrate, Qobuz offers the best value with a basic individual plan costing just under $11 per month. Apple Music and Tidal share second place at $12 per month, while Amazon takes fourth place at $13. Both Spotify and Deezer offer bandwidths of 44.1 kHz, but the former can output 24-bit tracks while the latter is limited to 16-bit. This means that even though Spotify charges $13 per month compared to Deezer’s $12, they end up fifth and sixth, respectively. YouTube Music Premium brings up the rear: it costs $12 per month. Keep in mind that you can enjoy discounted pricing on student plans, family plans, and YouTube Music users can even access special pricing by bundling a YouTube Premium subscription or this with a Google One cloud storage plan.
If you’re curious about music math, you can calculate the maximum bandwidth of high-fidelity bitrates by multiplying the indicated bit depth figure by the sample rate in Hertz, then again by the number of active channels in a song – most tracks are stereo, so in this case it’s two. As for other considerations, like whether the Bluetooth codec on your wireless headphones can support some of these streaming levels, well, we’ll leave that for another article.
