However, most people pick a streaming service and stick with it for years and years. When it comes to listening to music, you can always upgrade your headphones or speaker system. Subscriptions help fund the work we do every day. com and our print magazine (if you’d like). Special offer for Gear readers: Get a 1-year subscription to WIRED for $5 ($25 off). Amazon Music has also gone up in price, and several services have added tens of millions of songs to their catalogs since we lasted updated this article in February 2022. Updated September 2022: Tidal has (again) displaced Apple Music as our audiophile pick, due to audio quality upgrades. Be sure to check out our many other buying guides, including the Best Wireless Headphones, Best Wirefree Earbuds, and Best Cheap Headphones. We put ’em all to the test, and these are our favorites. Most of them have free tiers, but the experience improves if you subscribe and pay a monthly fee. The things that separate streaming services today are the quality of music discovery-whether it’s based on algorithms or human curation-the user experience on desktop and mobile apps, what devices you can use them with, and their sound quality. All these services’ libraries pretty much mirror each other, with tens of millions of songs both popular and obscure. These days, it’s more about the user interface than catalog choice. For example, Taylor Swift might have been on Apple Music but not on Spotify Tidal was originally weighted toward hip-hop. Music fans are streaming more music and other digital audio content than ever and judging by the most recent developments in other parts of the media and entertainment landscape, the streaming wave is unlikely to recede any time soon.Picking a music streaming service used to feel like choosing a sports team. And even though the overall growth in music streaming revenue has slowed since the mid-2010s, the figure is still climbing at a double-digit rate each year. This trend is already visible today, as most major players are vividly expanding operations in previously untapped regions with potential for subscriber and revenue growth. Over the next few years, both new and established audio streaming services are expected to add millions of subscribers but considering that markets such as the United States have already reached a certain level of subscriber maturity, there will likely be some shifts in regional focus. Streaming will undoubtedly remain the key driver of growth for the global music industry. Has music streaming reached its saturation point? After a failed IPO in 2015, the French streaming service announced its second attempt at going public by merging with special purpose acquisition company I2PO in early 2022. One European competitor that still has a long way to go to match these milestones but nevertheless made international news headlines in recent months is Deezer. According to the company’s latest filings, the number of Spotify premium subscribers reached a record 182 million users in early 2022, while revenues from its paid and ad-supported streaming models also peaked at nearly 9.67 billion euros. Data showed that Spotify remains the most popular music streaming provider worldwide, accounting for over 30 percent of all streaming subscribers and outperforming its closest competitors, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Tencent Music. While various smaller providers have amassed impressive user bases in their respective markets over the years, the global streaming landscape continues to be dominated by a handful of behemoths. Consumers can choose from an ever-expanding catalog of free and paid music streaming services.
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