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Apple Music was our audiophile pick until Tidal knocked it off the pedestal, but it’s still a very solid choice for lossless quality at $11 a month if you’re an Apple user. For select songs, audio streams at 16-bit, 44.1 kHz or 24-bit, 192 kHz quality. The latter matches Tidal’s best efforts. The biggest catch here is that Apple Music works best on iPhones, MacBooks, and other first-party Apple Devices. If you’re on Android and Windows, it’s best to look elsewhere.
Apple’s song catalog numbers over 100 million songs, all of which are available in lossless format. Some tracks are also available in Dolby Atmos. Apple Music’s regular, lossy format streams songs at up to 256 Kbps, which isn’t noticeably different from Spotify’s 320 Kbps.
Apple’s human-curated discovery options aren’t as fun as Spotify’s. As on Spotify, you can see what your friends are listening to if they’ve turned on social sharing. You’re limited to 100,000 songs in your library, but there are no limits to how many you can put in each playlist. Spotify is one of the few services to offer unlimited likes, if that’s a deciding factor.
I like the iPhone app, and the Android version is OK, but the desktop app is dreadful. Songs occasionally refuse to play, clicking “Add to Library” rarely works, and the Back button is a dysfunctional mess. Adding music to your library is tedious. If you navigate away from the browsing tab, the Back button takes you to the home screen, so you have to navigate all the way back to the album or artist you were looking at—except for when it nonsensically disappears. If you’re considering making the move, check out our guide to switching from Spotify to Apple Music.
If you’re planning to splurge on an Apple Music subscription with Dolby Atmos and lossless audio, you will need a pair of Apple-made headphones (to go with your iPhone and HomePod Mini). If, however, you favor Alexa-enabled speakers, you might want to consider Amazon Music, even if it’s not one of our top personal picks.
