Comparison of streaming music services (for classical music)

porco_rosso Is it worth to get apple classical music over Spotify? I do think the Spotify search engine and way of organizing is not really optimized for classical music.

I think that’s the only difference, the search engine of Apple Music Classical is optimized for classical music searches. Otherwise, it’s just like a different front end over the classical music subset from the entire Apple Music catalog which is probably the same as Spotify. I’ve found some bugs in Apple Music Classical though. To me IDAGIO is much better. What’s important to know though is this:

• IDAGIO is to me the best classical music streaming service in terms of search organization and curation. However, it’s only for classical music. Also, I’ve found that it lacks some recordings that are on Apple Music.
• Apple Music Classical is not a separate service that you can subscribe to. Instead, you subscribe to Apple Music (which is similar to Spotify) and then get Apple Music Classical for free since it’s just a different front end (search engine) to the catalog.
• Spotify has maybe the same catalog of music (non-classical and classical) but lacks the optimized search engine for classical.

I listen to classical music 90% of the time but I also listen to rock, pop, etc. and my wife and daughter listen to pop only which is why I find Apple Music best because it also has a family plan.

If someone is only after classical music, I’d recommend IDAGIO. Otherwise, both Spotify and Apple Music offer similar catalog and features but with the latter you also get the Apple Music Classical app for free and it’s useful.

There's also a fairly recent streaming service from the UK: prestomusic.com (they also sell physical products).

I have heard good things about them (for classical music only), but I have no experience with this service (or any other paid streaming service).

I've subscribed to most of the big streaming services at one point or another (Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Quobuz)

In my experience, they are all more or less the same, but there are certain features that might make you choose one over another.

I currently use Tidal, which I probably like best overall, although it's not perfect. If you care about sound quality, it offers higher resolution than Spotify for the same price, and its very well integrated into most third party hardware systems, meaning it usually has a built in application for most any streaming device you can purchase, and streams the music natively in the highest available resolution. I also find their interface to be really nice and well organized. Occasionally they will be missing an album I would expect them to have had, but for the most part I have no problem finding the things I want.

Apple music also offers high-res streaming for the same price and a huge catalog, but has terrible integration with third party services, meaning that they force you to use Airplay 2 to stream to most devices, basically rendering the higher-res functionality useless. I also downloaded their classical only app, but didn't find it much advantage to it over the regular app so almost never ended up using it.

Spotify may have the best third-party integration and user interface of all, but their sound quality maxes out at 320kbps. They been claiming they are going to offer a higher-resolution tier for years, but it has yet to materialize and I'm not holding my breath. If it ever does, I might go back, but I'm pretty happy with Tidal at this point.

It's been years since I subscribed to Qobuz, but at the time I remember their catalog was not as extensive as the other services. Perhaps it's better now, but I couldn't really say.