I am comparing not directly the sound but the compression used to deliver the music to you by looking at the best possible quality a service can deliver.
This chart is largely based on data from 2022 and was only partially updated in 2024.
| Service (Tier) | Lossless | Codec | Bitrate | Samplerate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| YouTube | No | Opus | ~100-140 kbit/s | 48 kHz |
| YouTube Live | No | AAC | 128 kbit/s | 44.1 kHz |
| Spotify App (Premium) | No | Vorbis | 320 kbit/s | 44.1 kHz |
| Spotify Web (Premium) | No | AAC | 256 kbit/s | 44.1 kHz |
| Spotify App (Free) | No | Vorbis | 160 kbit/s | 44.1 kHz |
| Spotify Web (Free) | No | AAC | 128 kbit/s | 44.1 kHz |
| Tidal High | Yes | FLAC | ~1411 kbit/s (lossless) | 44.1 kHz |
| Tidal Max | Yes* | FLAC or MQA | based on quality | up to 24 bit / 192 kHz |
| Apple Music | No | AAC | 256 kbit/s | 44.1 kHz |
| Apple Music Lossless | Yes | ALAC | based on quality | up to 24 bit / 192 kHz |
| SoundCloud | No | MP3 | 128 kbit/s | 44.1 kHz |
| SoundCloud (HQ) | No | AAC | 256 kbit/s | 44.1 kHz |
*Tidal Max can be lossless, if the selected track is available in FLAC. If the track is streaming in MQA, then you are not getting true lossless quality.
Ranking the non-lossless offers based on my personal (a bit subjective but well-informed) knowledge:
Please note that all lossless offers will deliver better quality than any lossy offer, meaning Tidal and Apple Music Lossless (which is included in the regular subscription) are better than e.g. Spotify or YouTube.
The one you like best: In reality Spotify, Apple Music (lossy), Tidal Premium and YouTube will sound good unless you reeeeaaaaaally care that much or have a very good system.
Even YouTube with it's low bitrate on all platforms sounds good enough because they use a very modern codec. Just make sure you actually listen to music and not the videos, as videos are likely uploaded with already compressed audio, especially community remixes or nightcore versions, thus lowering the audible quality significantly.
And also try to avoid SoundCloud's free offer for serious listening or louder than background music playback.
Bitdepth is usually 16 bit if not stated otherwise.
YouTube (and YT Music) uses a presumably custom method to control the bitrate of their Opus encodes. It also uses AAC audio for older devices/browsers for which it uses a standard bitrate of ~128 kbit/s.
Tidal Max, while having trasitioned most of their Hi-Res library to FLAC, still serves some content through the propriotary Master Quality Authenticated format and needs special hardware to be decoded up to their original quality. If such hardware is not available, the file will not be decoded up to the same quality. MQA is also said to not be lossless, contrary to their marketing. Please research this topic yourself if you consider Tidal because of their Master releases.
Apple Music uses it's own implemntation of AAC (often referred to as qAAC), which is said to be a bit better than fdkaac or other encoders, but of course that opinion has been heavily discussed. I recommend looking up resources for this yourself.
Apple Music Lossless is not a different tier, it is available to every Apple Music subscriber as long as their device supports it.
All data gathered for the example comes either directly from the service's respective website (like Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal and SoundCloud HQ) or from personal tests using tools that download the offered audio stream and analyzing it (like with YouTube or SoundCloud free).
This is partly very subjective and also dependent on the encoder for some codecs.
Genereally the codecs can be ranked in this order:
Opus > Vorbis > AAC > MP3
Ranking the encoding software:
opus > vorbis > qAAC/FDK-AAC > FFmpeg AAC > LAME (MP3)
FFmpeg (and Handbrake which is based on FFmpeg) use FFmpeg's AAC encoder, which is worse than FDK-AAC or qAAC but a bit better than LAME.
Generally most commerical services and software probably use FDK-AAC, with the exception of Apple.
Encoding at low bitrates (< 128 kbit/s) the ranking looks like this:
HE-AAC v2 > HE-AAC > Opus > Vorbis/AAC > MP3