Wondering about other streaming services? I tried the following three and didn’t like them as much as our top picks. Here’s why:

Amazon Music: The best thing about Amazon Music is that its basic ad-free tier is included with Prime, but it’s sneaky. It has a song catalog of more than 100 million tracks, up from “more than 90 million” this past fall, but listeners recently lost the ability to choose what to hear and when. Instead, they're stuck on shuffle. There's Amazon Music Unlimited—$9 per month for Prime members and $10 per month for everyone else—ditches the ads, and Amazon Music HD no longer requires an extra monthly fee on top of Unlimited’s price tag, but its clunky interface and so-so music discovery hold it back from being a top pick.

Deezer: This international audio streaming service has made multiple inroads to compete with Spotify, but we found its features lacking. On iPhone and Android, you can only “favorite” 1,000 albums and artists, each. That’s way too low, especially considering its 90-million-song catalog. Music discovery suggestions are pretty bad too. Since it’s a French streaming service, a lot of the curated playlists include tracks from albums that you can’t play in the US. Several tracks in the Ray Charles collections were missing when I checked, for example. It also had a dismal Back button that would skip screens.

Pandora: Once the king of music streaming, Pandora is still very popular, but it has steadily lost listeners over the last decade. The free tier is full of ads. There’s a visual ad in the app window, ads periodically interrupt your listening on the curated radio stations, you need to watch ads to skip tracks, and you need to watch ads to search for and play specific songs. Paying $5 a month gets rid of them, except you still have to watch ads to search for your own tracks. The $10-a-month Premium tier lets you search for songs without ads, but like the other tiers it promises unlimited skips but has fine print saying that “skips (are) limited by certain licensing restrictions.” The maximum bit rate of 192 Kbps is too low to be worth paying for. It’s a bad deal all around. Pandora is simply falling further and further behind.