High Resolution Audio’s guide to getting the best Jazz music streaming plan.
Jazz is a dynamic and expressive musical form that emphasizes improvisation, rhythmic complexity, and a blend of musical traditions. Originating in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in New Orleans, Louisiana, blending African and European musical traditions it now comes to encompass everything from New Orleans Jazz to Fusion via Swing, Bebop, Cool Jazz, Jazz Funk and many other sub-genres making it one of the most diverse musical forms around.
Deciding on the best Jazz music streaming plan can be difficult if you or your family have varied music tastes. In this case one of the mainstream music streamers who offer a variety of genres might be the way to go. Opting to get rid of the kids K-Pop tracks in favour of a full-on diet of Charlie Parker is unlikely to do anything for family harmony. If it’s only your individual choice and you are exclusively a Jazz music enthusiast then a specialist Jazz music streaming service may well prove to be a better choice.
Audio quality can often be an issue for Jazz fans especially with small acoustic combos or experimental artists who push the boundaries of soundscapes. If on the other hand your tastes lie with forms from the early 20th century such as the blues, trad jazz or swing then going full-on HiRes may be overkill.
So, with all this in mind we have divided up our recommendations into Mainstream Music Streamers and Specialist Jazz Music Streamers in the hope that this will provide you with enough information to make an initial selection. Most of the streaming services offer a free introductory period – usually a month, but sometimes longer with promotions – giving you the opportunity to try these out before committing to a subscription plan.
Mainstream Music Streamers
Our top two recommendations are Qobuz and TIDAL. Both of them have extensive Jazz collections with curated playlists and offer both CD Quality and HiRes audio streaming. TIDAL comes in at £10.99/month and Qobuz at £10.83/month on a yearly plan. Both offer individual and family plans. Qobuz has a Couples plan for the smaller household and may just have the edge if you want to have downloads of your favourite tracks which are often available up to 24-bit/192kHz HiRes and some in DSD/DXD format.
Coming in very close would be Apple Music and Amazon Music which both have good Jazz catalogues in both CD Quality and HiRes followed by Deezer whose jazz catalogue tops out at CD Quality. Apple Music which also comes bundled with Apple Music Classical plays very nicely with the Apple ecosystem and could well appeal to the family with diverse musical tastes. For individuals or families that subscribe to Amazon Prime, and that’s over half of us in the UK, the additional Prime discount on Amazon Music might well tip the balance in their favour.
The other mainstream services all have issues which make a recommendation difficult to make. Napster has some lossless tracks but is rather coy on how many are available and how many Jazz tracks it has. Spotify despite being one of the most popular streamers and an excellent record on showcasing new music including Jazz and all its related forms, still doesn’t have a lossless service which for many with audiophile interests could be a deal breaker.
YouTube Music has the worst audio quality of all the streamers but it does have access to a large number of rare audio and video clips. If audio quality is not high on your list of priorities and you or your family already subscribe to YouTube then a YouTube Music add-on might work for you.
SoundCloud is more focussed on new and popular music but if your musical tastes run more in that direction, it certainly wouldn’t be a poor choice although there is no lossless CD Quality streaming.
Before leaving this category, it is worth mentioning Freegal. Its catalogue contains over 18 million songs with a good selection of Jazz. The service is only available via libraries and so if your local library subscribes to their service, you may be able to access these tracks for free. Our article on Free music from your library has more details.
Specialist Jazz Music Streamers
This selection of specialist Jazz Music streamers, some with on-demand streaming and others with radio or playlist streaming, has an enormous variety both in content and audio quality. Such is the diversity of Jazz our recommendation is to take up the many free trial offers and find the service that works for you. Presto Music is the most conventional of the offerings here and would be a good place to start followed by The Jazz Groove and Vialma Jazz.
Jazz24 is a free online non-profit ‘radio style’ streaming service supported by listener donations. There is a webplayer and links for smart devices and network players. Direct links for 48kbps, 64kbps, 256kbps AAC and 128kbps MP3 streams are available here.
jazzed is a dedicated Jazz streaming service which started in February 2020. There is a free Radio channel and its jazzed+ subscription plan offers 20 curated music channels, live showcases, insights and documentaries as well as exclusive articles and interviews. When the service started in 2020 there was the prospect of a premium subscription plan streaming in CD Quality Lossless FLAC but this seems to have been dropped as an idea. The current jazzed+ service streams AAC+ at 160kbps and will set you back £3.99/month. Availability is pretty much everywhere except North America.
JazzRadio.com is a streaming service with 40+ channels of curated jazz music. An annual Premium subscription costs £5/month, £50/year or £72 for 2 years. Audio quality can be either 320kbps MP3 or 128k AAC and is user selected. There is also a free service which streams five random channels every day at 64kbps AAC-HE. In addition Premium subscribers get access to RadioTunes, Classical Radio.com, RockRadio.com, Zen Radio and DI.FM giving you over 200 more channels of music to listen to.
Presto Music is an interesting choice as it is a combination music streaming and download service specialising in Classical music and Jazz much of which is in HiRes. It has over 160,000 classical recordings, over 70,000 jazz recordings, over 850,000 sheet music titles, more than 55,000 music books and over 40,000 musical instruments to browse and purchase online. Their Streaming plan is available for £10.99/month and downloads and physical media are also available including CDs, SACDs and vinyl LPs.
The Jazz Groove is a streaming service with five jazz radio stations. According to the service, ‘it began as a non-commercial, non-profit, single radio station in 2016, specializing in Laid-Back Jazz. Since then, we’ve expanded to five jazz radio stations, and launched new features for supporters including Song Skip Functionality, Hi-Res Audio and the ability to Omit Fund Drive Messages.’ They have a jazz collection of 15,000 recordings and a monthly subscription costs $10/month or $100 for an annual pass.
Vialma Jazz is the companion website to Vialma Classical and offers thousands of hours of on-demand jazz plus curated playlists in 320kbps MP3 for £5.90/month. An upgrade to All Vialma which includes its Classical Music catalogue and CD Quality Lossless FLAC streaming come in at £9.90/month.
Try before you buy
All of our top choice music streamers offer a free trial period so you have the opportunity to try all of them before committing to any one of them. None of them tie you into a contract so you are able to cancel at any time.
Mainstream Music Streamers
Amazon Music/Amazon Music Unlimited
Amazon Music is an ad-free on-demand service offering online access and offline playback to 100 million tracks, ad-free podcasts and thousands of playlists and stations and is included free with an Amazon Prime account. Audio quality is restricted to their lossy SD quality (256kbps). Prime membership is £8.99/month or £95 for an annual subscription. Two adults can link Amazon Prime accounts in an Amazon Household account but unfortunately Prime Music is not shareable.
Amazon Music Unlimited is an ad-free on-demand service offering online access and offline playback to Amazon’s complete catalogue of 100 million tracks and podcasts. There are more than 70 million tracks in CD Quality Lossless FLAC (branded HD), millions of tracks in HiRes (branded Ultra HD) and an unknown number of tracks in spatial audio. Access to all these lossless formats are included in the basic subscription price. An individual subscription costs £11.99/month (£10.99 for Prime members) and a Family plan will set you back £19.99/month – both options available with a 30-day free trial. The Family Plan allows up to six accounts with streaming on up to six devices at once.
Apple Music/Apple Music Classical
Apple Music/Apple Music Classical has a catalogue of over 100 million tracks in CD Quality, HiRes and spatial formats. An individual subscription plan costs £10.99/month and a family subscription for up to six members is £16.99/month. For this you get access to two apps – Apple Music and Apple Music Classical – with the Classical app having a dedicated Classical Music search function to over 5 million tracks. As you would expect there is easy integration into the Apple ecosystem and recently, they have introduced an Android and a dedicated Carplay app.
Deezer
Deezer Premium is an ad-free on demand service offering online access and offline playback to 120 million tracks in CD Quality Lossless FLAC and this will cost you £11.99/month. A Family Plan is available for up to 6 users and a total of 13 devices across all six Deezer Family profiles and will set you back £18.25/month when paid annually. Each user can have their own profile which allows kids, teens and parents to enjoy the music they like. For smaller households there is a Duo account for two users which costs £14.84/month when paid annually.
Freegal
Freegal’s catalogue contains over 18 million songs with a good numbe of Jazz music tracks. The service is only available via libraries and so if your local library subscribes to their service, you may be able to access these tracks for free. Our article on Free music from your library has more details.
Napster
Napster has come a long way from its peer to peer file sharing days. It now offers an ad-free on-demand service with a catalogue of over 110 million tracks some of which are now lossless for £10.99/month. A family plan for up to 6 accounts is available for £14.99/month. The number of Jazz Music tracks is unknown.
Qobuz
Qobuz has two subscription tiers, both of which offer a Family plan. For the smaller family they offer a Duo subscription for couples and more information can be found here.
Studio – This gives you access to over 100 million tracks in lossless FLAC many up to 24-bit/192kHz. There is an offline listening feature in this package. An individual subscription comes in at £10.83/month and a Family subscription for 6 come in at £17.99/month on an annual subscription.
Sublime – You get everything in the Studio package plus a discount of 60% on HiRes downloads. An individual subscription comes in at £14.99/month and Family subscriptions for 6 come in at £17.99/month on an annual subscription. Qobuz has recently added DSD/DXD downloads to their service.
There is a dedicated Jazz Store where you can download CD Quality and HiRes albums and this can be searched by title, artist or browsed by sub-genre such as Contemporary Jazz, Bebop, Jazz Fusion etc.
SoundCloud
SoundCloud offers individual plans (SoundCloud Go+) starting at £10.99/month with a student discount of 50%. There is a restricted SoundCloud Go plan offering limited access to the full catalogue which comes in at £5.99/month. However, there are no couples and family plans available. Whilst Jazz and Blues can be found on SoundCloud it really isn’t its strong suit. However if you want to search out the latest trends in popular music then SoundCloud is the place to head to.
Spotify
Spotify offers Individual, Duo, Family and Student subscription plans. A Premium individual subscription is £11.99/month and a Duo subscription is £16.99. A Premium Family subscription for 6 comes in at £19.99/month. There is a large selection of Jazz Music including playlists, compilation and individual tracks. However, the long awaited lossless streaming has still to materialise and Jazz fans will have to decide whether Spotify’s audio quality is good enough.
TIDAL
TIDAL recently amalgamated its HiFi and HiFi Plus plans into one low priced tier offering Individual, Family and Student options. It has an extensive catalogue of Jazz Music available in CD Quality and HiRes lossless FLAC plus editorial articles on Jazz Music.
Individual – this offers 110M+ tracks in lossless, HiRes FLAC and Dolby Atmos; Ad-free, offline listening and personalized mixes, editorial playlists, and Live sessions at £10.99/month. MQA files are still available when these have been supplied by the artists’ record companies.
Family (up to 6 members) – there are 110M+ tracks in lossless, HiRes FLAC and Dolby Atmos; Child appropriate playlists and curated content for kids and each member has an individual account. Family plans cost £16.99/month.
Students can get a discount of 50% on an individual plan but there are no couples plans available.
YouTube Music
YouTube Music offers access to an ad-free streaming service with over 100 million songs, videos and live performances. An individual plan cost £10.99/month with a Family plan for up to 6 individuals coming in at £16.99/month. A Student subscription can be had for £5.49/month but there is no couples plan. Both YouTube Music and its sister site, YouTube, have plenty of Jazz tracks and videos. The audio quality is 256kbps AAC and Opus and this may put off the Jazz enthusiast who values high quality audio.
Specialist Jazz music streaming services
Jazz24
Jazz24 is a free online non-profit ‘radio style’ streaming service supported by listener donations. There is a webplayer and links for smart devices and network players. Direct links for 48kbps, 64kbps, 256kbps AAC and 128kbps MP3 streams are available here.
jazzed
jazzed is a dedicated Jazz streaming service with a free Radio channel. Its jazzed+ subscription plan offers 20 curated music channels, live showcases, insights and documentaries as well as exclusive articles and interviews. The jazzed+ service streams AAC+ at 160kbps and will set you back £3.99/month. Availability is pretty much everywhere except North America.
JazzRadio.com
JazzRadio.com is a streaming service with 40+ channels of curated jazz music. An annual Premium subscription costs £5/month, £50/year or £72 for 2 years. Audio quality can be either 320kbps MP3 or 128k AAC and is user selected. There is also a free service which streams five random channels every day at 64kbps AAC-HE. In addition Premium subscribers get access to RadioTunes, Classical Radio.com, RockRadio.com, Zen Radio and DI.FM giving you over 200 more channels of music to listen to.
Presto Music
Presto Music is a combination music streaming and download service specialising in Classical music and Jazz much of which is in HiRes. There are over 200,000 albums and 70,000 booklets available in their Streaming plan which is available for £10.99/month. Downloads and physical media are also available including CDs, SACDs and vinyl LPs.
The Jazz Groove
The Jazz Groove is a streaming service with five jazz radio stations. It has five jazz radio stations, and for supporters provides Song Skip Functionality, Hi-Res Audio and the ability to Omit Fund Drive Messages.’ They have a jazz collection of 15,000 recordings and a monthly subscription costs $10/month or $100 for an annual pass.
Vialma Jazz
Vialma Jazz is the companion website to Vialma Classical and offers thousands of hours of on-demand jazz plus curated playlists in 320kbps MP3 for £5.90/month. An upgrade to All Vialma which includes its Classical Music catalogue and CD Quality Lossless FLAC streaming come in at £9.90/month.
