I love music but I’m kind of a broke college student. I want to support artists so I don’t pirate. What I really want from a music service is the ability to listen to the songs I already own and an easy, and hopefully cheap, way to check out new stuff. I’ve found a few that I’m pretty happy with and a bunch of stuff that was pretty nifty, though maybe not as useful.
It's mine, precious!
Spotify
I’m late to the game on this one. I just discovered Spotify a month ago and I’ve got to say it’s pretty sweet. Spotify uploads the music from your personal library and lets you listen to as much music as you want for free and make playlists. There are some minor catches. Spotify doesn’t have everything in it’s music collection. I’ve had a hard time finding some soundtracks and foreign artists. The free version also has ads that it makes you listen to every so often.
The worst thing about Spotify would have to be the price for the premium account. Without the premium account you can’t use the mobile app. I listen to music the most when I’m on the go so having music on my phone is a must. For $10 a month, you can use the mobile app and get rid of the ads. I understand that, when you break it down, 10 bucks a month to listen to as much music as you want is pretty awesome. Remember, though, that I’m a poor college student. So it’s either Spotify or Netflix, and I NEED my crappy horror movies. It’s still pretty cool though and worth it if you have the cash.
YouTube
Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell anyone how to use YouTube. I’m sure we all have that one down pat. I just want to say how awesome playlists are for listening to music and how much it sucks that most music videos are unavailable from YouTube’s mobile app. I don’t want to download VEVO. Needing two apps to play YouTube videos is silly and VEVO doesn’t have all the videos it has available on YouTube’s regular site available in the app. Back to playlists. They still rock for listening to music on YouTube provided that it decides not to crash your browser and you don’t mind ads before each video.
It's also visually pleasing
Google Music
I am a lover of all things Google. Every service that Google offers, I snatch up greedily. I even have a Google Plus account. Yeah, I love them that much. That being said, Google Music is actually good!
It’s set up to attract indie artists and pays them a decent percentage from sales, so it’s definitely a good place for supporting artists. And it holds up well from the broke college student angle. There’s a free mobile app for android and a decent mobile website for Apple devices that lets you stream from your google account and store offline playlists.
I only have 8 gigabytes at my disposal so often times I just stream music over data. Music prices are similar to music stores like Amazon and iTunes, but they also have a free song everyday and a playlist of free music. T-Mobile offers their customers free songs through Google Music. Google lets you store 20,000 of the songs you own and whatever you purchase through them for free and allows you to access them via the cloud from your mobile device and computer. Not too shabby. The down side being that you really aren’t going to get a lot of free music, especially compared to a service like Spotify. Finally, streaming over data was a lot smoother with Google Music than with Spotify.
MOG is a lot like Spotify except the free version doesn’t let you listen to unlimited songs. It doesn’t actually say how many you can listen to for free, it just shows a meeter and supposedly you gain more songs by browsing and sharing but without an actual counter for songs I guess you’re just supposed to trust them. This is another site that doesn’t let you use the mobile app unless you pay for their service. The paid service also lets you listen unlimitedly. MOG doesn’t seem to have the library Spotify does. MOG says they have 13 million songs. Spotify doesn’t want to give a number, their site says the have millions of songs and add 10,000 new songs a day.
Not this kind of 8 track
8Tracks
Remember when I said that some of the stuff I found was useless but cool? I was referring to 8Tracks. 8Tracks lets users upload music from their own libraries and make playlists that others can listen to and rate. They have a mobile app that’s free too. Unfortunately each playlist can only have 2 songs from the same album and the uploader can be a bit buggy. Playback isn’t always smooth either and playlists are often short. As a social music experience or as a way to find music related to artists you already like, 8Tracks could be useful. However, for those needs, I’d rather use my old fallback, Pandora.
These are only the music services I’ve run across so far and I’ve probably missed a few good ones, so drop me a comment and let me know what I’m missing. I’d encourage everyone that is looking for a music player to check out Spotify and Google Music at least. Spotify has a free month trial of their premium service so you can see what you’re missing with the free version. Google Music is a Google service which automatically makes it awesome, right? All Hail Google.