Most of the streaming music services offer free tiers -- including Spotify, Pandora, Amazon and YouTube -- but they do come with a couple of caveats. First, these are usually playlist services, in which you can pick a song and the rest of the tunes auto-generate -- you can't pick exactly what you want to play. The other potential downside is that they come with ads, and sometimes it's the same ad for every break.

At the time of writing, all of the services offer at least 100 million tracks each -- while Deezer says it has 120 million -- but that's not the end of the story. The number of songs offered by a music service used to be the main differentiator, but as always, it's quality over quantity that counts -- and particularly if you're looking for more obscure tracks. Depending on your favorite genre, some of the services may offer a better catalog for under-the-radar (Spotify), indie (Apple) or hip-hop artists (Tidal). Users who are less ambitious about expanding their musical taste should be satisfi

Amazon was one of the first services to offer uploading your MP3 collection into the cloud, but this was officially discontinued in 2018. Meanwhile, both the Apple and YouTube services allow you to combine your personal music collection with the streaming catalog, although tagging and organization can be a time-consuming challenge (your myriad live Phish tracks won't organize themselves). Still, if you've invested money in digital music over the years, those two services offer a patch to continue enjoying that music online.