Spotify

Is Spotify still the world's best music streaming service?

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Spotify is the longest-running, most subscribed-to streaming service, primarily because it offers the best user experience and is historically renowned for innovating through constant software developments and features.

Algorithm-led music discovery and personalised mixes are, for example, areas where the competition is made to look decidedly second-rate. Spotify has branched out into podcasts and audiobooks with great success, while its annual ‘Wrapped’ social campaign has become the talk of every December. Despite increased competition, Spotify remains true to its founding “music for everyone” ethos, too, by being one of the only services still offering a free tier alongside its paid-for Premium one.

But the latter is where Spotify’s biggest problem lies: Spotify Premium doesn’t offer hi-res (or even CD-quality ‘lossless’) audio quality and is now pricier than several services that do, including Apple Music, Amazon Music and Tidal. Spotify has for many years promised a higherquality ‘Spotify Hi-Fi’ tier – the development of which is still in “the early stages” – but for now it is leapfrogged in the sound department. That isn’t its only glaring omission, either.

The immensity of Spotify’s catalogue has historically won the service points for being the world’s biggest. A decade ago its song library was 30-million strong, but today that figure is, according to Spotify, “more than 100 million tracks”. The gap between its library size and that of other mainstream services isn’t what it once was, though – Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music now also claim 100 million, while Tidal puts its catalogue at “110+ million tracks”.

Podcast growth