Introduction

Apple Music has come a long way since Tim Cook and Jimmy Iovine finally announced the tech giant’s Spotify rival to the world in 2015.

When we first reviewed the highly anticipated music streaming service, it had around 35 million songs, was baked into Apple’s ageing iTunes software, and capped audio quality at an MP3-comparable 256kbps. We loved its Spotify-beating sound, playlist curation and Beats 1 radio station, but felt that patches of clunky interface and imperfect offline listening hampered the service.

Today, the catalogue is more than three times that size, has its own app available on almost every audio device you could think of, flies the flag for 24-bit high-resolution quality, and is as operationally intuitive and seamless as they come.

But its competitors have hardly stood still in that time either, and arguably the music streaming playing field is now more even than ever. So where does Apple Music rank today and is it worth subscribing to? I compared it to Spotify et al to find out.

Price

• Individual plan undercuts Spotify
• Includes Apple Music Classical service

Gone are the days when individual subscriptions cost a tenner a month, although Apple has resisted price hikes more stubbornly than most.

An Individual subscription costs £10.99 per month, which is reduced to £5.99 for students (who also get Apple TV included in that price), while a Family plan, which grants Individual accounts to up to five people in a household, is £16.99 per month.

If you’re fully ensconced in Apple’s service ecosystem, it may well make sense to subscribe to Apple One, which bundles Apple Music, Apple TV, Apple Arcade, Apple Fitness+, Apple News+ and iCloud+ storage for a monthly fee of £18.95.

Every plan includes access to Apple Music Classical, a standalone app that features over five million classical tracks and a specialised composer/work/conductor search tool.

In terms of the Individual plans, those prices compare favourably to Spotify and Qobuz (£12.99), Amazon Music Unlimited and Deezer (£11.99), and price-match Tidal and YouTube Music.

Platforms

• Integration favours Apple device users
• Android app available and well optimised

Apple Music is accessible on a plethora of devices, from Apple hardware such as the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, HomePod and even Apple Vision Pro, to Android phones and tablets, Windows PCs, smart TVs, PlayStation and Xbox, and Sonos, Amazon and Google speakers.

It’s available via CarPlay and Android Auto too, and you can now play Apple Music on a web browser. There isn’t a ‘Connect’ casting feature, as offered by Spotify and Tidal, but there is, of course, AirPlay, which is extensively supported by audio hardware nowadays.

Apple Music is not as exclusive to Apple devices as it once was, with Apple having made a concerted effort to open up the service to third-party hardware and platforms, although users of non-Apple gear do still miss out on some features.

These include Siri voice assistance, AirPlay casting (the Android app works with Google Cast instead), the Apple Music Sing karaoke function (the Android app only displays real-time lyrics), and the AI-powered AutoMix feature, which creatively transitions one song to the next (the Android app offers simpler crossfade transitions instead).

Some Apple hardware, including newer iPhones, iPads and Apple TV, can also exclusively benefit from the head-tracking spatial audio feature when listening through compatible AirPods and Beats headphones.

Catalogue

• 100m+ song library competes with others
• 24-bit/192kHz hi-res audio
• Dolby Atmos-powered spatial audio
• Apple Music 1 24/7 radio station
• Audiobooks and podcasts are offered via separate apps

Apple Music competes on the song library front with over 100 million songs, its catalogue available in 24-bit hi-res audio. Songs with sampling rates up to 48kHz are labelled as ‘Lossless’, while tracks between 48kHz and 192kHz are flagged as ‘Hi-Res Lossless’.

On an iPhone, the former can be natively output via the port to connected headphones, while the latter requires an external DAC to be added to the hardware chain.

Apple wasn’t the first service to offer hi-res streaming, which was pioneered by Tidal and Qobuz during Apple Music’s formative years, but it arguably made the biggest impact in opening it up to the masses when, in 2021, it upgraded its catalogue’s audio quality to hi-res, free of charge. Amazon was forced to respond, almost immediately ditching its higher-priced hi-res tier and also bringing 24-bit quality to all subscribers, and Tidal has since followed suit.

Like Tidal, Qobuz and Amazon, Apple Music offers ‘full-fat’ hi-res up to 24-bit/192kHz, while Spotify, which only added hi-res streams in late-2025, tops out at 24-bit/48kHz. Whether or not the discrepancy between those figures truly matters depends on the equipment you’re listening with.

If you stream only to Bluetooth headphones, for example, it doesn’t matter so much as Bluetooth technology cannot transmit 24-bit audio without compression anyway. Generally what matters more is how the services’ streams, regardless of their bit and sample rates, actually sound, which I’ll come to momentarily.

Thousands of songs in the catalogue are available in Apple’s Dolby Atmos-powered spatial audio, a technology that essentially creates more immersive, 3D-like mixes. It’s proprietary and goes hand-in-hand with Apple’s aforementioned head-tracking technology, although Dolby Atmos mixes are available on other services such as Tidal and Amazon.

Spatial mixes tend to have a Marmite reaction, and with good reason. Some are definitely more engaging than others, whether that’s down to the song itself or the way they’ve been mixed or recorded, and some music fans simply prefer good old-fashioned stereo.

One jewel in the service’s crown is its flagship 24/7 live radio station, Apple Music 1 (formerly Beats 1), featuring daily DJ programming hosted by the likes of Zane Lowe, Travis Mills and Rebecca Judd. Apple has since expanded its radio offering with stations that appeal to broader genres – dance and electronic, ambient, country and Latino – and it’s become a significant – and significantly valuable – part of the service, with artist takeovers, interviews and in-studio performances providing a bulky on-demand offering within the ‘Radio’ section (one of only five tabs on the UI).

Curation

• Accurate AI-driven playlists and recommendations

Music curation has become much more intelligent in recent years, and nowhere is that more evident than Apple Music. As with other services, you have AI-curated ‘stations’ offering a seamless stream of music based on particular genres and artists, and their exposure on the ‘Home’ screen adapts to your listening habits the more you use the service, as do ‘Made for you’ playlists like ‘New Music’. I’m particularly fond of the ‘Discovery Station’, which continuously plays music you haven’t played before based on your listening history.

I subscribed as a ‘new’ user to see whether the initial experience had changed since my last rodeo with Apple Music, and within just two days of medium-to-heavy use, the Home screen had adapted to throw up more useful suggestions based on my tastes.

Recommendations were spot on, and I liked the mix of ‘big’, well-known names and smaller artists. ‘Favouriting’ songs, rather than just listening, seems to help this process too.

Editor-curated playlists, such as pop/R&B-focused ‘Today’s Hits’, are also updated weekly, as is Apple Music Replay, a year-end recap of, and ongoing insight into, your top tunes. Apple has of March 2026 introduced Playlist Playground, which, similar to Spotify’s, creates a playlist based on text prompts (‘laid-back songs for a sunny summer’s day’, for example) – but it’s only available in the US at the time of publish.

User Experience

• Clean, colourful and easy to navigate
• Largely consistent across devices (even Android and Windows)
• Handy Siri integration on Apple devices

The next tab along from ‘Home’ is ‘New’, which, as you’d expect, is a gateway to newly released songs and albums, new (and newly updated) playlist curations, trending and chart music, new radio episode uploads, and culturally timely and relevant content, an example of which is a ‘Eurovision in Spatial Audio’ playlist, flagged as the event takes place within a week of my testing period.

Along from ‘Radio’ is the ‘Library’ tab, where you can access all your local music and ‘favourited’ streams in one place, and the ‘Search’ tab, which complements a comprehensive search tool (that includes finding songs from lyrics) with shortcuts to specific categories of content, such as spatial audio, karaoke and music based on mood, genre and decade of release.

I tested Apple Music on an iPhone, iPad, a Google Pixel phone and a Windows computer and was pleasantly surprised by how consistent – and consistently excellent – the interfaces and general user experience were, much more so than when I had used the Apple Music app for Android several years prior. What was once a busy, fairly clunky UI across devices is now more or less the opposite.

While the rapid growth of AI-based curation alongside the expansion of non-music content in the streaming service world has generally resulted in increasingly dense (often borderline overwhelming) user interfaces, Apple has kept things clean and comprehensible. The wealth of content recommendations under each tab is ‘just right’, slap bang in the middle of ‘is that it?’ and ‘endless scrolling’.

Podcast lovers and (audio)bookworms may be frustrated that such content isn’t baked into the Apple Music app and, to some extent, offered within the subscription, as is the case with Spotify; they are instead offered in separate apps, Apple Podcasts and Apple Books. But that does allow the service to focus on its music and radio catalogue, and I, for one (admittedly not a huge podcasts or audiobooks fan), prefer that pure music-only approach. I certainly believe the interface benefits from that narrower focus.

On Apple devices, Siri is a useful and accurate way to control playback hands-free, too, whether you ask for songs directly or demand the voice assistant find you, say, “a good playlist for running”. You can also search for songs by reading out some lyrics (I tried this with ten songs and it found nine successfully), and since Shazam was acquired by Apple and has now been baked into Apple hardware, that has become a neat, easy way to identify music playing around you, and access it on the service.

Sound Quality

• Hi-res audio support all the way up to 24-bit/192kHz
• Sounds better than Spotify

Apple disrupted the market when it included hi-res streaming in the standard subscription rather than offering it within a pricier premium tier, becoming the best-value hi-res service overnight and forcing the established competitors to realign their offerings.

Hi-res support goes all the way up to 24-bit/192kHz, on par with Tidal, Qobuz and Amazon, but despite such apparent uniformity, catalogues do differ and not all streaming services sound the same.

Apple Music has always been one of the better-sounding services, categorically second only to Qobuz, its streams pleasingly clear and open, sparkling with detail and entertainingly punchy. It’s a clean, articulate listen that sounds that bit more engaging than Spotify, despite the huge gains the world’s most popular streaming service has made to its audio quality in recent months. The extra clarity and openness are the first things to jump out, and it doesn’t take long to realise there’s a greater sense of dynamism to proceedings too.

If you’re listening through wired headphones for the best sound experience, it’s worth adding a dedicated DAC (digital-to-analogue converter) to your phone/laptop chain to unlock the streams available beyond 24-bit/48KHz, too. Even a relatively modest headphone/DAC combination will reveal the extra information in a 192kHz recording.

Should you buy it?