The best streaming music services: Spotify, Apple, Amazon and a dozen worthy alternatives

Sure, you canstream music for free. And if music is just background noise, then you might be willing to put up with ads and the occasional inability to skip a track you don't really like.

But if you're a real music fan, you're probably willing to pay to rid yourself of those annoyances, and you have plenty of online options to choose from, as we learned in researching this guide.

We focused on sites that offer ad-free streaming, with a large collection to choose from. Most of the mainstream services have access to the same collection of 40 to 60 million tracks; we also included some specialized services that offer alternatives to the major record labels.

Every service here offers ad-free streaming for its paid subscribers, with the ability to save content for offline listening and stream any song or album on demand. Most also offer custom playlists, smart DJs, and other ways to discover new music based on things you already like.

A few of the services in this list also offer the option to buy music and add it to your collection, and several others include tools to upload tracks from your personal collection to mix and match with the online catalog. For an extra few bucks a month, music fans with golden ears can upgrade from compressed audio to ultra-high-quality lossless streams.

Also:Best free music services in 2020

Variety is the spice of life. It's also sweet music to most listener's ears.

When you're looking for alternatives to the major record labels, consider one of these services.

When audio quality is your top priority, check out these offerings.

Our selections for this guide are based on market research and hands-on personal experience. For our selections, we included only services that are subscription-based and allow ad-free music streaming on multiple platforms, with the ability to save music for offline playback.

Using those criteria, we chose not to include a few services that were a less than perfect fit. That list includesSiriusXM, which is more of a radio network than a music service, and7DigitalandeMusic,  which focus more on selling music than streaming.