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- A good music streaming service gives you access to millions of the latest songs.
- Amazon Music and Spotify are two of the most popular platforms you can subscribe to.
- Amazon has lossless music for audiophiles, but Spotify has better options for playlists and sharing.
Finding a music streaming service that fits your needs is crucial to ensuring a great listening experience at home or on the go. Spotify and Amazon Music are two of the leading services worth considering.
Each platform has around 75 million songs, along with their own set of features. Both have apps for iPhones, Android smartphones, computers, and popular media players so you’ll be able to listen to your music on a variety of devices.
That said, there are a few differences that could make one service a better fit over the other. We compared the two across a variety of categories to help you decide which is right for you.
Amazon Music vs. Spotify: Which is better?
Spotify may be the world’s most popular music service, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t consider Amazon Music. Both platforms offer members unique features and price points.
In fact, Amazon Music is trying hard to differentiate itself by offering higher fidelity tracks at no extra charge, providing a lossless listening experience that can come closer to the quality of the original recording. The service also has some nice perks for Amazon Prime members.
Though Spotify plans to introduce a lossless audio option as well, it won’t launch until later this year. That said, Spotify does have an edge over Amazon in a few key areas. The service is known for its highly customized playlists and sharing features, and its ad-supported plan offers more music and control than Amazon’s free option.
Below, you can find a full comparison of features, plans, and pricing for Amazon Music and Spotify.
Feature comparison
Pricing and plans
Business Insider/Lisa Eadicicco
Both Spotify and Amazon Music can be used for free, but the free tiers are significantly limited and largely amount to Internet radio on mobile. Both services offer new members 30-day trials to test their paid versions.
Spotify plans
Spotify’s plans include: Free, Premium, Premium Duo, Premium Family, and Premium Student.
The ad-supported option is completely free. This plan lets you listen to any song through the mobile or desktop app, but you do have to deal with constant ads and you can only skip six songs per hour. If you don’t want commercials, you can choose one of Spotify’s Premium plans. The more expensive options allow you to add more users, so multiple people in the same household can listen at the same time.
Students can also take advantage of a discounted Premium rate of just $5 a month. As a bonus, this plan also comes with complimentary subscriptions to Showtime and ad-supported Hulu .
Amazon Music plans
Amazon Music‘s plans include: Free, Amazon Music Prime, Unlimited, Unlimited Family, and Single Device.
Unlike Spotify, Amazon Music’s completely free option doesn’t let you listen to specific songs on-demand. Instead it offers an experience more like streaming radio with ads.
If you have an Amazon Prime membership, you get access to an expanded music service, called Amazon Music Prime, as part of your subscription. This plan is ad-free and has on-demand access to around 2 million songs. For access to Amazon’s full library of songs, however, you need to upgrade to a Music Unlimited plan for an extra fee.
College students who are members of Amazon Prime can claim a discount for Amazon Music Unlimited that lowers the price to $1/month instead of $8/month.
Music Unlimited also offers the option to restrict streaming to a single Amazon device for a reduced fee. You can give a single, eligible Echo or Fire TV device access to Music Unlimited for just $4 a month (instead of the standard $10).
Audio quality
Spotify and Amazon Music both provide similar quality for their free plans. Music streaming is compressed to reduce size and data requirements, but most people listening on mobile devices and earbuds likely won’t notice any major quality issues.
When it comes to audio quality for paid plans, Amazon Music outperforms Spotify. In the past, Amazon Music charged an extra fee for its Music HD plan, but the streaming service now includes CD-quality streaming with its Music Unlimited plans. Some tracks are even provided in Ultra HD, which exceeds the specifications for CD quality.
Amazon Music HD’s superior quality will be noticeable for some people, but to fully take advantage of the increased sound performance you’ll need higher-end speakers or headphones, as well as a wired connection to your playback device.
Though Spotify doesn’t currently offer a CD-quality plan, the service will be adding that option, called Spotify HiFi, later this year.
Interface
The look and feel of both streaming services are similar. Amazon and Spotify each feature a navigation bar across the bottom of their mobile apps with a home screen, search, and collected library of music.
While most people use music services through their mobile devices, both Spotify and Amazon Music do offer desktop apps as well. This is where the two experiences differ. Spotify’s desktop app is decent and has been refined over more than a decade. In March 2021, the streaming service announced an updated interface to allow offline downloads and give “more control” for creating playlists.
The Amazon Music desktop app, on the other hand, is very utilitarian. The interface on a Mac is unintuitive and completely unlike its mobile app counterpart. For instance, the design makes it difficult to use the listening queue mechanism.
For listening on your computer, Amazon Music’s web interface is better and simpler to use than its app. In Spotify’s case, it’s definitely an advantage to have such a solid desktop app.
Performance and features
Spotify and Amazon Music both offer a lot of the same features. For example, the catalog of songs available to listen to hardly varies at all, and any exclusives are mostly negligible. However, that’s not to say there aren’t some key differences that could sway subscribers to one service over the other.
For Amazon Music, its mobile app includes its Alexa voice assistant built-in. This functionality means that all music controls can be performed via hands-free voice commands. The version of Alexa accessible through the music app can also perform other skills. For example, you can ask Alexa to control smart lights the same as you would through an Echo. Spotify does offer a “Hey Spotify” feature that lets its members use their voice to find artists and songs, but its functionality isn’t as robust as Alexa.
The Amazon Music app’s other main feature includes X-Ray lyrics. This is a neat and genuinely helpful feature that allows lyrics to scroll by as the song plays for a karaoke-like experience.
Merch pages are also now attached to select artists’ profiles on Amazon Music to make it easier to buy their merchandise right from the Music app. Amazon Music introduced Car Mode in April 2021, as well, to provide a simplified, minimal interface for commuters.
Though these Amazon features are appealing, Spotify still has a clear edge when it comes to its great music algorithms, which the service puts to use in the form of personal playlists. “Discover Weekly” and other playlists definitely set the music service apart from others. If you don’t know what to listen to, you don’t have to suffer through generic radio.
Spotify also allows filters based on genres and moods. Playlists have an “enhance” button, too, which can add random songs that are similar to the ones you’ve already included. Duo and Family members can also access regularly updated playlists based on everyone’s listening history. A “recently played” option is also in the works that will allow users to look back at their past three months of streaming.
When it comes to travel and commuting, Spotify features integrations with Google Maps and Waze , as well as a dedicated car interface with big buttons to keep your music listening safe on the road.
More so than any other music service, Spotify functions like a music social network and allows you to follow friends and easily share songs back and forth. This works well because it’s the world’s largest music platform and has the most listeners who will gladly click on a link you share.
The bottom line
A few years ago, the question of whether you should use Spotify versus Amazon Music was an easy choice. Now in 2021, that choice isn’t as clear cut. The good news is that both services offer compelling features at reasonable prices.
On the one hand, Amazon Music Unlimited includes CD-quality audio with its base subscription plan for no extra charge. The service also offers a nice discount to Prime members.
That said, Spotify remains the better choice for most people thanks to its masterfully curated playlists and seamless music sharing. And, while Amazon does have a free plan, the catalog of available songs is quite limited compared to Spotify’s larger selection of free ad-supported tracks.
