Disney+ review: An all-singing, all-dancing family streaming service with music docs and more

The days of channel surfing were meant to be a thing of the past, replaced instead with the remarkable convenience of instant, on-demand streaming-subscription television. Unfortunately, the problem wasn’t the channels; it was us, and our indecision – something which bleeds not just into picking what to watch, but also where to watch things on.

This is because the streaming ‘wars’ are all-but over, with a cavalcade of services and streamers all competing for that vaunted spot in your direct debit list.

Disney+ is one of the major players in this regard, being a mainstream service with a huge library of instantly-recognisable content – but what type of music content is available? Does a subscription represent good value for money? Ultimately, does Disney+ deserve your patronage?

Prices and tiers

Disney+ offers two subscription tiers in the US – Basic and Premium – the cheapest of which is $11.99 per month with ads and no downloads, and the premium-est of which is $18.99 per month (or $189.99 per year) with no ads and yes downloads. Both tiers enjoy 4K streaming, and you can add an extra member to either with an extra monthly $6.99.

In the UK, there are three subscription tiers: The first, and cheapest, comes in at £5.99 per month, and offers simple 1080p streaming with occasional ads peppered in; the second is a Standard plan, at £9.99 per month, removes the ads, adds another device to your streaming capacity, and allows you to download media for offline watching.

At the top of the pyramid, you can have Premium for £14.99 per month, with 4K HDR media and the capacity to stream across four devices. You can also add an extra member to any one account, with an additional monthly cost of £4.99 for Standard with Ads or £5.99 for the upper two tiers.

Content

Disney+ is, naturally, home to a wealth of kid-friendly and animated media, from classic Disney animations such as Fantasia and Snow White to modern-classic Pixar features from Toy Story to Soul.

Disney+ is also an inspiring platform for music content and features a rich seam of documentary filmmaking, from reflexive looks at film-scoring in Music By John Williams to examinations of Bruce Springsteen and Elton John.

Arguably old news by now, but nonetheless a series about which I’ll continue singing from the rooftops (eh? eh?), is a Disney+ exclusive: Peter Jackson’s sprawling, yet granular exploration of The Beatles’ writing and recording of Let It Be, in the form of three-part, near-eight hour-long limited series Get Back.

It’s an astonishing piece of patchwork filmmaking, using extensive audio and video recorded by Michael Lindsay-Hogg (initially cribbed into 1970 feature film Let It Be, also now available on Disney+) to build a true fly-on-the-wall experience. Talent, tension and surprisingly relatable camaraderie abound in an invigoratingly touching snapshot of a band in crisis. Never has watching a bunch of late twenty-somethings lark about in a studio been so engrossing.

If The Beatles isn’t quite your speed, there's a good amount of content to dig through - although I would like to see more musical content added to the roster.

At the time of writing, you can also watch celebrated Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, Queen Rock Montreal, Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story, Summer ’82: When Zappa Came To Sicily, Abbey Road: If These Walls Could Sing, Hip-Hop And The White House, and the 2024 biopic on The Beach Boys.

Disney also owns the Star Wars IP, making it the exclusive home of countless new spin-offs, origin stories, limited series and pre-existing cartoon media.

And if that wasn't enough, Disney+ is also home to the entire Marvel universe, more Pixar movies and shorts than you can shake a stick at, the National Geographic Channel, the Hulu network (featuring The Beatles Anthology, the excellent comedy crime drama Only Murders In The Building starring Steve Martin, Selena Gomez and Martin Short, Alien Earth, and the entertaining football documentary series Welcome To Wrexham with Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney.

User experience

Using the Disney+ app as installed on my LG smart TV, I found the experience of browsing and selecting media surprisingly easy. It’s at least as responsive as Netflix’s own library, and much faster than a great deal of other platforms I’ve tried before. Same went for streaming, where media resolved quickly and rarely faltered.

In my testing of the Standard With Ads tier, I found the mid-roll ads surprisingly unobtrusive; any ad break is a frustration, but it’s far less of one when it’s between 40 and 90 seconds long, and when it’s well-timed enough that you were already getting up to make a cup of tea anyway.

The alternatives

For music, cartoons and family-friendly media, there’s a wealth of alternative content on Paramount+. The remit of this particular subscription service is much smaller – with an accordingly lower price in each equivalent tier – but what is there is well worth the money.

Netflix is always going to show up as an alternative, being arguably the OG streaming platform and bigger than it’s ever been. There’s a broad range of content across all genres, but nothing quite like Star Wars I’m afraid.

And let's not forget the mighty Amazon Prime Video which has a ridiculous amount of excellent music-related content spanning multiple genres including The Osbournes, alongside series like Fallout and Rings Of Power, and live TV streams dedicated to fan-favourites such as Northern Exposure and The Incredible Hulk.