Deezer vs Tidal vs Qobuz vs Apple Music vs Spotify vs Amazon Music
Comparing Music Streaming services
Which music service is right for you? How do they compare on usability, audio quality and music suggestions? Let’s find out!
Spotify
Spotify is the king of music streaming services. Its market share is almost twice the size of the number two which is Apple Music and for good reason. The breadth of its library and suggestion algorithms is top of the bill. Pricing is competitive, including a free tier, and third-party device support is unmatched. My posh (not so new) Naim soundbar supports Spotify only as a streaming service. Being able to play music independently of your phone or PC is a real bonus feature, making Spotify act like a radio in the house but with my content, which even beats Apple’s Airplay, which needs a dedicated device (phone, computer) to play the tracks.
Spotify is renowned for its music suggestions and it gives you several kinds of suggestions to discover new music. I’ve certainly found some of my favorite artists through Spotify.
Contender(s)
Apple Music is of course Spotify’s main contender. Apple joined the streaming partly relavility late though gained an impressive market share quickly. Apple has no catalog issues I could find and offers great hardware support for people that are in Apple’s ecosystem, while also offering Apps for Windows and Android.
Tidal
Tidal is supposedly known for its big music catalog, but in my test it didn’t have all my ‘rare’ tracks. It has a workable desktop player that gets frequent updates (though never spectacular improvements) and fairly good but lacklustre suggestion algorithms. It took me a while to find out Tidal even had suggestions. Spotify and Deezer do better in this area. You can play an album and Tidal will continue with relevant songs, which works fine.
The elephant in the Tidal room is MQA. It’s been recently proven to be lossy and question marks have been raised on what it’s doing to the original audio. MQA is something the artists, hardware manufacturers, and consumers are all paying for, but are apparently not benefiting from. An audiophile should probably look elsewhere.
Contender(s)
Qobuz competes with Tidal on absolute music quality, which Qobuz wins. Deezer is Tidal’s main rival though: Deezer has a bigger catalogue and better software for less. A reason to stick with Tidal is mostly the ‘brand’ and their higher fees for artists and they also offer some unique content like interviews and concerts.
Qobuz
Qobuz is the service for high res music, currently the only mainstream service offering true lossless music up to a baffling 24 bits at 192kHz. That’s 190 megabytes of compressed data for a 5-minute song!
Qobuz puts classical music front and center, but it has a wide range of other genres. On a yearly plan, you can get this extreme level of sound quality for just €15 a month, which beats Tidal on price and quality. The real pain point for Qobuz are the holes in their catalog. Sometimes it’s missing specific albums and some artists are not present at all. It even manages to have particular songs missing from an album, which the Qobuz app will play for 2 seconds and then abruptly skip to the next track 🤬 If Qobuz doesn’t solve the catalog issues I will move to another service once my subscription ends.
The Qobuz desktop app has the option to select an output device. It used to be a bit unresponsive, but that that’s much improved recently. It still doesn’t respond consistently to the systems play/pause button. Even in the App pressing the space bar doesn’t pause the music (!) and I have to manually click the pause button to pause it.
Contender(s)
Deezer is the main contender for Qobuz, offering lossless tracks (“CD quality is enough for everyone”) but with a very complete catalog, better software (e.g. Deezer has an Apple Watch App) and very enjoyable recommendation algorithms.
Deezer
I found Deezer a pleasant surprise to use. It’s a name that I had heard of, mostly concerning Internet service providers offering a bundled subscription, but never concidered. The desktop App was responsive enough, though the UI design feels a bit cluttered at times. The catalog was surprsingly broad as well, showing all the tracks in my ‘rare’ collection. It has a cool feature where it plays your entire library of favorites with suggested tracks mixed in. It has good App support, including an Apple Watch App and Apple Car app. It allows you to stream any song in Apple Car, something Tidal and Qobuz refuse (they only play pre-downloaded songs).
Contender(s)
If you don’t care about high resolution music, Spotify is still the music service for most people and though Deezer is a pleasant alternative that tries very hard, it’s doesn’t offer any tangible benefits over Spotify. If you can get Deezer for less than a Spotify subscription, go for it.
For CD quality music it’s currently the best option, Qobuz beats it in outright bytes per second, but the bigger catalogue, music suggestions and snappier desktop App makes Deezer a winner in my book.
Amazon Music
Amazon starts right of the bat with a mildly irritating user experience. The client download is a hefty 120 megabytes. In contrast Spotify’s download is just 1 megabyte. The Amazon Music App is very bare bone and a bit rough around the edges (ugly).
Amazon Music is a mixed bag when it comes to the catalog. For popular tracks it seems to suffice, but I did miss some tracks, ranking it close to Qobuz for catalog size. Amazon is supposed to have an uncompressed music (HD) offering, but it seems unavailble in my country, though I could be wrong abou that, Amazon always confuses me. Singing up was a confusing experience, with the music subscription hidden in the plethora of settings on Amazon’s website.
Contender(s)
All services have some benefit over Amazon, either in quality, App experience or algorithms. I’m surprised Amazon music is not cheaper than the rest, given Amazon’s strategy of always operating at razor thin margins. If it were half the price, it could be an upgrade for Spotify Free users, but as it stands it doesn’t appeal in any category.
Apple Music
Apple has a long tradition with digital music. Of course it enabled the adoption of digital/compressed music with its iPods and iTunes music store.
Apple has a vast catalogue and landed some exclusives in the past, though these days practically all artists are generally available to stream, including stubborn mega stars like Pearl Jam and Adele. Apple is my go to service for tracks I can’t find on Tidal or Qobuz.
Apple Music offers music suggestions, but doesn’t put them front and centre like Deezer or Spotify. They work fine though and you can easily just ‘start playing’ both your known and suggested tracks. Apple could take it a step further by offering personal playlists for certain moods or genres.
The Apps are of course top notch, given that you’re in the Apple ecosystem. Of all the hardware vendors only Sonos supports Apple Music, where Apple’s main rival Spotify basically invented hardware integration.
In the ends there’s not much to fault Apple Music, though it doesn’t excite in any particular category. It offers verified ‘digital master’ which already sound great while there’s rumours of a high-res option coming soon.
Conclusion
- You just want to stream? Go with Spotify, it’s still the most advanced streaming service. If you’re fully Applefied, Apple Music is a good option as well, but lacks in the suggestions area.
- Need ultimate music quality? Go with Qobuz, it has its quircks but once you find your songs and get it to play them you can be sure you’re getting the best of the best.
- Looking for an upgrade from Spotify in terms of audio quality? Go with Deezer. It‘s close to Spotify’s usability while rivaling Qobuz and Tidal on audio quality.
Here’s a tabular summary of the different services. Please leave your suggestions for other criteria to rate on.
P.S.
Where’s Google Youtube Red Play Music Unlimited service?
I left out Google’s (or is it YouTube) music offering because I don’t understand what it is, how it relates to Youtube, and/or if it still exists after December 2021.
My ‘rare’ songs list
- Eddy Navia, track: Basta Corazon: Qobuz, Tidal
- Jon and Roy, artist: Qobuz
- Skyrim, soundtrack: Qobuz
- Outland series season 1, volume 1: Qobuz, Amazon
- Emma Movie soundtrack, song: Country life: Qobuz, Amazon
- Gregory Alan Isakov, album: Evening Machines: Qobuz
- Ashana, album: All is Forgiven: Tidal
Desktop App rating explained
There’s some things to consider when rating the desktop app.
Output selection: Does it have an output selection, so you can output your music to a headphone while keeping other audio on your speakers?
Responsiveness: Is the app fast and responsive, does it consume a lot of resources? I added memory usage as a metric in the summary table. Apple is the only one offering a native App on MacOS which gives it a smaller footprint.
Apple ecosystem support
For Apple fanboys, I’ve also listed each music services’ support for Apple devices:
