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.

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

Musixmatch for iPhone – Know what your music is all about

Knowing a song's lyrics can add much more feeling to the tune. Unfortunately, it's not always easy to understand what the vocalist is saying. That's where Musixmatch steps in. The service claims to house the largest collection of official song lyrics. Launch the app and whatever song is currently playing ...

Albums (feat. Louie Mantia) – Listen to your music the way it was intended

Whatever happened to listening to albums as they were meant to be listened to? These days, we find ourselves shuffling through thousands of songs and artists all mixed together. Let's listen to our iTunes music library the way the artists intended us to, one album at a time. Thats exactly ...