Best free music streaming services

Millions of songs in the palm of your hand, no storage woes and you don’t even have to pay – that’s the promise of these free music apps. The only tricky part is deciding which streaming service is most worthy of your time. But don’t fret, we are here to help.

Most major music streaming services have a free tier, barring Tidal (unless you live in the US), Qobuz and Apple Music, and while free services inevitably include adverts and have more-limited functionality and audio quality than their paid-for stablemates, they are still pretty tempting, especially given the cost of living crisis right now.

Keep your ear to the ground and you will often find one, two, three, or even six-month free (or almost free) deals on certain streaming service’s paid-for tiers too, to try the sonic goods before you buy.

We would always nudge you towards better quality streams (for which you will pay a fee), but if you are only an occasional listener, free music streaming services also make more sense than paying for something you barely use.

Here we have rounded up the best free options around so you can see which suits you.

1. SPOTIFY

Still top of the game, though there’s plenty of hi-res competition around

SPECS Quality of free tier Up to 160kbps Library size 82 million+ Platforms iOS and Android apps, desktop app, web player, smart TV apps, connected speaker support, cars

FOR • Plenty of ways to find new music

• Easy to use AGAINST • Not the best sounding

• No lossless audio

The best-known free streaming service is also one of the best. You will have to put up with ads if you don’t want to pay, and you will also have to listen to most playlists on shuffle mode, but there’s still plenty to like. Decent sound quality, more than 82 million songs, offline listening, bags of podcasts, new features arriving daily and it works on almost any device imaginable. For free streaming, Spotify will probably be your first port of call.

2. AMAZON PRIME MUSIC

The best streaming service you didn’t know you had

SPECS Quality of free tier 256kbps Library size 2 million Platforms iOS and Android apps, Echo and Fire TV devices

FOR • 2 million songs for free

• No adverts

• Works with Alexa AGAINST • Free to Prime subscribers only

If you have Amazon Prime, you can access Amazon’s entry-level music streaming service. As well as free one-day delivery and Prime Video, Amazon Prime entitles you to Prime Music: more than two million songs to stream on-demand at no extra cost. And the best