Thirty-odd dollars a month for a family of five to stream music sounds reasonable until you actually tally up what else that household is paying for streaming video, cloud storage and a phone plan. That’s roughly where most of the big music services sit for a family plan in Australia right now, give or take a dollar or two depending on when you signed up. Readers keep asking which service is actually worth the subscription, so here is music streaming compared the way most households actually use it. The honest answer is that the differences are smaller than the marketing suggests, but not non-existent.
The big three on price
Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube Music all sit in roughly the same bracket for an individual plan, somewhere in the high single digits to low teens per month in AUD. Family plans, covering up to six accounts under one roof, land around $25 to $30 a month depending on the service and whatever promotional pricing is running that month. Student plans shave a decent chunk off for anyone with a valid .edu email, which is worth checking even if you finished uni years ago and just happen to be doing a short course.
Where it gets interesting is the free tiers. Spotify’s free, ad-supported version is still the most generous of the lot, letting you listen to more or less anything with some shuffle restrictions on mobile. Apple Music has never offered a genuinely free ongoing tier, just trial periods. YouTube Music’s free version is really YouTube with the screen off, which works fine until you want the song to keep playing after you lock your phone, at which point it nudges you toward Premium.
Sound quality: does it actually matter?
All three now offer some flavour of lossless or high-resolution audio at no extra cost, which is a genuine shift from a few years back when Tidal had that corner of the market largely to itself. Apple Music includes lossless and even spatial audio with Dolby Atmos as standard. Spotify has been promising a lossless tier for what feels like forever and has only recently started rolling it into Premium in some markets. YouTube Music’s upper bitrate is solid but doesn’t market itself on audiophile credentials the way the others do.
Here’s our mildly unpopular opinion: for the vast majority of people listening through phone speakers, a single earbud on a train, or a cheap Bluetooth speaker in the kitchen, lossless audio makes almost no audible difference. We’d rather a service nail its recommendation algorithm and its playlist curation than chase a spec that only matters on a decent pair of wired headphones in a quiet room. If you’ve got genuinely good gear, fair enough, go looking for the lossless badge. Otherwise it’s a marketing line more than a lived experience.
Catalogue size and discovery
Catalogue size is now close to a non-issue. All three major services claim tens of millions of tracks, and unless you’re chasing something genuinely obscure, out-of-print or region-locked, you’ll find it on whichever app you’ve already got installed. The real differentiator is discovery, how well the service actually learns what you like and surfaces something new without being annoying about it.
Spotify still leads here in our experience. Its algorithmic playlists, the weekly discovery mix and the daily mixes built around specific genres or moods, are genuinely good at finding things adjacent to what you already listen to. Apple Music leans more heavily on human-curated playlists and radio shows, which some listeners prefer precisely because it feels less like being profiled. YouTube Music sits somewhere in between, and benefits from the sheer breadth of YouTube’s video catalogue when you want a live version, a remix or a fan upload that never made it to official release.
Family and household plans, and the arguments they cause
Every major service now does a family plan, typically six accounts, one bill, and separate listening histories and recommendations per person. The catch across all of them is the same: everyone needs to be registered at the same home address, which the services check periodically. That trips people up more than you’d expect, particularly share houses or blended families where someone’s at the other parent’s place half the week.
The logic here is similar to the shared-login arguments we’ve seen play out over streaming video for years, something we’ve touched on when working through household device and account setups like those in our smartwatches and ecosystem comparison guide. If you’ve already got a household splitting a video subscription, adding a music family plan on top is usually still cheaper than everyone running separate individual subscriptions, but only just. Do the sum before you assume it’s automatically the better deal, especially if one or two people in the house barely use the service.
The smaller players worth a look
Amazon Music sits quietly in the market, often bundled into a Prime subscription at a lower cost than people realise, and its catalogue and lossless tier are perfectly competent even if its app interface lags behind the others. Tidal remains the choice for people who genuinely care about audio fidelity and artist payout structures, though its userbase in Australia is small enough that social features like shared playlists with friends can feel a bit lonely. Deezer has a loyal but modest following here too.
Then there’s the free, ad-supported radio-style options, things like the ABC’s own streaming apps or community radio streams, which don’t get mentioned in these comparisons often enough. If what you actually want is someone else choosing good music for you, rather than an algorithm, live radio over the internet is still completely free and arguably underrated.
Privacy: what these apps actually collect
Music apps aren’t usually top of mind when people think about data privacy, but they quietly gather a fair bit: listening history, device identifiers, rough location for licensing purposes, and increasingly, voice data if you use a voice assistant to request songs. None of this is unusual or sinister on its own, but it’s worth knowing what you’re agreeing to, particularly if you’re setting up a family plan for teenagers.
The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner’s guidance on the Australian Privacy Principles is a reasonable starting point if you want to understand what any app, music or otherwise, is obliged to disclose about data collection. We’d also point out that under the eSafety Commissioner’s social media minimum age framework, music streaming apps themselves aren’t captured by the under-16 restriction the way Instagram or TikTok are, since they’re not social networks in that sense, but the social and sharing features bolted onto some of these apps are worth a second look if you’ve got a younger listener in the house. If you’re setting up accounts for kids, it’s the same afternoon’s work as checking the settings we’ve covered in our piece on Australia’s social media age restriction rules, just applied to a music app’s sharing and public playlist settings instead.
Podcasts, audiobooks and the video crossover
Spotify has spent years trying to become a podcast platform as much as a music one, with mixed results depending on who you ask, though its catalogue of exclusive shows is genuinely large now. Apple Podcasts remains separate from Apple Music, which some people find annoying and others don’t notice at all since the apps live side by side anyway. YouTube Music benefits enormously from simply being YouTube underneath, so if what you actually consume is podcast video content as much as audio, it already has the edge without trying.
Audiobooks are the newer wrinkle. Spotify now bundles a modest monthly audiobook allowance into Premium plans, which is a genuinely useful inclusion if you’re someone who alternates between music and a book on the commute. It’s not a full Audible replacement, but for casual listeners it quietly adds value to a subscription you’re already paying for. If you’re weighing up device ecosystems more broadly, our rundown of the best tablets in Australia covers some of the same bundling logic, since a lot of these subscriptions quietly stack on whatever device family you’re already in.
Music streaming compared: which one should you actually pick
Our honest take, having moved between all three for extended stretches: if you’re starting from scratch with no existing ecosystem loyalty, Spotify remains the easiest to recommend for most Australian households, mainly on the strength of its discovery tools and its free tier as a genuine fallback option. If you’re already deep into Apple’s hardware, an iPhone, a HomePod, an Apple Watch, the lossless and spatial audio inclusions make Apple Music the path of least resistance and arguably the better value given what’s bundled in at no extra cost. YouTube Music is the pick if video content, live performances and fan uploads matter more to you than a polished app experience, because that’s genuinely where it has no real competitor.
None of these choices are permanent. Most services let you export playlists via third-party tools if you do decide to switch, and none of them lock you into hardware the way some ecosystems do with other products. Try the free trial, listen on your actual speakers or earbuds rather than a shop demo pair, and give it a fortnight before deciding. That’s usually enough to tell whether the algorithm’s actually listening to you or just repeating itself.
Featured image: AI-generated illustration.
