The options for listening and discovering music these days are almost endless, but what is the best way to enjoy your favorite music? Sound quality, selection, price and discoverability are all important qualities to consider when deciding the most enjoyable way to listen. 

Although streaming services provide an extensive variety of music they lack audio quality. These services use low-quality, compressed files that leave out audio information. The price is unreasonable unless you are willing to tolerate lengthy advertisements. Streaming services provide a great way to discover new music. Algorithms curate new songs, albums, and artists based on the user’s musical tastes, ensuring music lovers will easily find new tunes to enjoy. Streaming services check off almost all boxes except quality, so if you are compliant enough to sacrifice the quality, Spotify is for you. 

Cassettes can easily take last place on this list, although you can walk around with a walkman and headphones and look very cool, you will be sacrificing quality and durability. Cassettes degrade in clarity overtime and if you leave them in your car on a hot day they may get damaged. They cost about the same as a CD, but your selection is fairly limited. New artists rarely produce tapes, and old tapes tend to be fuzzy and may randomly skip. Coming from personal experience, even brand new cassettes can be squeaky and usually don’t skip songs smoothly. Unfortunately due to cassettes lack in sound quality, selection, price and discoverability they take the last place on my list. 

CD’s are a slight improvement from cassettes in quality. The files include much more sound information, making the music cleaner and more immersive. In terms of selection, you can get almost any album you want on CD easily, whether that’s online, in a record store, or even at a thrift shop. Although CD’s have variety and selection, they are unable to provide the same element of discoverability that streaming services have. Price wise CDs are fairly cheap, a brand new CD is about twelve to fifteen dollars and used CDs are often half that price. But beware when buying used, scratches can completely ruin the listening experience, and ongoing frustration can result in a smashed CD player, so look carefully when purchasing. CD’s are a good way to listen to music, what they are lacking in discoverability and price, is made up for by decent quality and selection.

Last to cover is Vinyl, fun to collect and great to listen on. Vinyl records provide listeners with excellent sound quality and ample selection. They are timeless, and have made a major comeback over the past few years. Music lovers are able to listen to newer music on vinyl along with old, and more classic albums.  Price wise, records can fluctuate from about five cents to fifty dollars depending on popularity and the number of original pressings. In terms of discoverability records rank about the same as CDs and tapes, it’s hard to find records that will fit your taste in music solely based on a vinyl cover. But despite the hassle of record players, they are worth the trouble; Vinyl records have a beautiful sound and – almost – flawless quality.

So, now the question is: What’s the best way to listen to music? Vinyl records take number one. They have the best quality and good selection and if you have a quality pair of headphones that you can connect to your record player, you will get a sense of immersion along with the impressive audio quality. Although you will have to invest in a record player and some records, the cost is worth it.