Free tier: Yes | Individual plan: $12/month | Duo plan: $17/month (2 members) | Family plan: $20/month (up to 6 members) | Student plan: $6/month | Streaming quality: Up to 320kbps Ogg Vorbis
Spotify is the most popular music streaming service, and as such it’s available on the widest array of devices and platforms. A Spotify Connect feature makes it a breeze to move your stream from one device to another without losing your place. It also has a decent free tier — not good, mind you, as you still have to deal with ads, limited track skips and no offline downloads — which provides access to most of the service’s social features and gigantic music and podcast catalog at no cost.
Those social features are another area where Spotify excels. You can follow friends, discover and collaborate on other people’s playlists and easily share your own mixes. You likely know about Spotify Wrapped, which remains a certified Big Deal every year. With many artists, you can also view tour dates right from the app and find links to buy tickets and merch.
If you want podcasts and audiobooks alongside your music, meanwhile, Spotify has gone all-in on those. Most podcasts you enjoy are probably on here, a number of popular shows are exclusive to the service and paid members get 15 hours of audiobook streaming as part of their subscription.
Spotify is built around playlists much more than full albums, and it leans harder on “the algorithm” than rivals like Apple Music. The good news is that many of those playlists are genuinely great. “Discover Weekly” fully deserves its reputation for digging up tracks you haven’t streamed but still align with your tastes. A regularly updated “daylist” morphs with the kind of music you stream at different points in the day. What feels like a billion other mixes based on artists, decades, moods and more nebulous concepts (from “cottagecore” to “escapism” to “Ethiopian jazz”) are mostly on point. There’s still plenty of manually curated playlists as well: Things like “Rap Caviar,” “New Music Friday” and “Viva Latino” may not be personalized to your tastes, but they’re clearly put together by knowledgeable people who are in tune with current trends.
In truth, other services are no longer that far behind Spotify when it comes to surfacing relevant new music. Still, simply following the app down its many rabbit holes will usually lead you to something enjoyable, and its playlists typically do well to mix lesser-known acts in with the big names.
Spotify’s biggest issue is its interface: It’s kind of a mess. The desktop app has a handy sidebar that provides fast access to your library, while the mobile app puts several playlists, podcasts and recent listens right at the top. After that, there are rows of podcast and audiobook suggestions sandwiched between a shotgun blast of playlists. At least some of those, however, may be programs you’ve never shown an interest in. The way Spotify pushes you toward aesthetically similar content is good for finding three-minute songs, but it’s much more obnoxious when applied to hours-long shows. Podcasts are not music; you can’t group and recommend them by vibe the way you can with certain tracks. If we like the Engadget Podcast, for instance, that doesn’t mean we want to spend another 80 minutes listening to other, possibly more aggravating people talk tech.
Keep scrolling, and the mobile app descends into a string of large TikTok-style suggestion cards. These look slick, but scrolling through a feed of giant icons, one recommendation at a time, isn’t an efficient way of finding something interesting. Spotify has also spent the last couple of years pushing an “AI DJ” tool that works like an algorithm-based personal radio station, but while it’s technically impressive, it still tends to make jarring leaps between genres. In our most recent round of testing, it managed to jump from Fleetwood Mac to Playboi Carti within five tracks.
And while we realize that everyone consumes music differently, it must be said that the app’s playlists-over-all approach essentially devalues the album as a concept. Intentional or not, it can turn listening to music into an echo chamber, one where you don’t have to engage with the way musicians make their art.
In more objective issues, Spotify lacks any sort of lossless streaming despite confirming a CD-quality “HiFi” tier four (!) years ago. Every few months, we get whispers of the service coming actually for real this time, but at this point we’ll believe it when we see it. Though you can play local files through the Spotify app, you can’t import them into your library across devices as neatly as you can with Apple’s service. The Premium plan also costs a dollar more per month than Apple Music (for now).
Last but not least, while no music streaming service properly values artists — buy merch and tickets, folks — Spotify has a particularly horrible reputation for low payouts. A recent Harper’s report even said that the company has populated some playlists with copy-cat tracks credited to fake artists to further pinch pennies. (The company has disputed this.) Ultimately, our guide is for consumers, and Spotify still does enough well in certain areas to be a worthwhile product for some people. In many ways, however, it has become the poster child for the streaming industry’s most worrying traits.