If you’re one of those people who are tired of paying $1.29 for a digital copy of a song to listen to on your MP3 or computer, perhaps you’ve thought of subscribing to a streaming music service. How do you figure out what’s the best and most cost-efficient option for you?
Most of the streaming music services are all around the same price point so figuring out what each one does better (or differently) than the others and how that fits in with what you want is the key.
The newest entry is iTunes Radio which was released in fall 2014. As Spin magazine pointed out, Apple is a company that doesn’t do things first but they do them better and that seems to be their goal with iTunes Radio. You can play it on your iPhone, iPad, Mac and even on a PC. There are more than 250 DJ-curated stations or you can build your own radio station and in a thing Apple always does particularly well, the more you listen, the more iTunes Radio knows what you like and can suggest music to you. Basic iTunes Radio is free (hooray for that!) but comes with the occasional ad you’ll need to listen to. If you want to be ad-free, consider upgrading to iTunes Match for $24.99 a year (which also includes storage of all of your music – even music you’ve downloaded from your CDs – in iCloud).
(Full disclosure here. I’m not only an Apple enthusiast but also a big Beatles fan and iTunes is – as far as I know – the only streaming music service that has their catalogue available as of now).
Spotify is the most used streaming music service right now and has a great reputation. It’s featured prominently on Facebook (I’m always getting notifications from Spotify about songs my FB friends are listening to) and is very easy to use. Its catalog is over 20 million songs and it’s app-based which means that you can find an app for it whether you use an IOS or Android system or are on a Mac or a PC. You can get Spotify for free as an app on tablets, smartphones and computers but you’ll see a lot of ads. For $9.99 a month (with no contract needed and a free 30-day trial) you can get access to every song everywhere with no ads at all.
Google Play Music was introduced in the spring 2014 and has been getting rave reviews. The service provides you with a 20,000 song digital locker and an All-Access subscription for $9.99 a month (with a free 30-day trial) and comes with a radio feature. The service includes more than 20 million songs and lets you stream or download anything in their catalog to your mobile device. And until very recently, there was no iPhone or iPad support for the All-Access subscription service. There is now but Google Play Music won’t let you buy songs for your iPad or iPhone through its service. On the plus side, because you can upload your own music to All-Access, you can create playlists that combine your own music with songs available through the service.
If you’re interested in a freebie app for your phone, you can try iHeart Radio which lets you create your own radio station or pick one of their genres and they’ll give you suggestions about what to listen to. For those of you who know me, you won’t be surprised that the BeeGees station is my go-to playlist on iHeart Radio. One minor downside of this site – which you can forgive because, after all, it is a free site – is that you do get a lot of pop-up ads and if you don’t like a song, you can skip it but after skipping more than a few songs, you’ll get a notification telling you you’ve reached your maximum skip limit for the day.
Ultimately, iTunes Match is the least expensive option but it’s worth trying out Spotify and Google Play Music through their 30-day free trials and find out what suits your needs. Either way, the days of buying individual songs one at a time seem to be long gone.
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