While Apple Music has been a long time in the making, now that its out Apple’s streaming contenders have been upping their game. At the top of the heap is Spotify. Originally available in Europe for years before its US release, Spotify has a huge collection of tracks available to stream on your iPhone, iPad, and computer.

All these tracks are available to stream randomly for free with advertisements interspersed. But one of the coolest features of Spotify is the ability to search for and stream any album at will. You won’t be able to pick individual songs from the album but instead Spotify will randomly play all the songs – a pretty awesome free feature if you ask me! Now, if you don’t want advertisements, would like to pick songs to play, and even download them to your iOS device for offline listening, Spotify does offer a $9.99/month service.

Spotify is just one of our favorite music apps for iPhone and iPad. We’ve collected all of our favorites here. And if you’d like to see more of our top app selections in different categories, just head on over to our Best Apps Series.

Spotify Get music and podcastsSpotifyMusicFreeDownload

Here are a couple of our other picks of the best music apps for iPhone and iPad:

Discovr Music – Explore a visual network of music on your iPhone and iPad

Do you have an artist that you love, but feel you've exhausted every avenue of their discography? Wouldn't it be nice to easily be able to find similar artists to the ones you love? That's exactly what Discovr Music will help you do. Just type in an artist, and Discovr ...

WhoSampled for iPhone – Discover the history of your music

Have you ever listened to a new song and asked yourself, "Haven't I heard this before?" You very well could have! For years, music artists and producers have "borrowed" parts of other songs and recycled them into there own creations. This is called sampling in the industry. It's easy to ...