When
you click on a grayed-out song, it tells you that it's
not available,
unless you already have it stored on your
hard drive. (Credit:
Screenshot by Karyne Levy/CNET)
At this point, music lovers and listeners now have 10 scrillion ways to listen to music online. But where to start? Do you patiently upload all your music to Google Music? Do you check out what your friends are listening to on Spotify? Rdio? Mog? Pandora? Which ones are free, and which ones cost money? Or do you just forget about online music and just go back to listening to CDs (assuming they’ll even be around in a couple of years)?
Because there are so many ways to listen to music (remember live concerts?), if you have favorites not mentioned here, please share them in the comments. But for the purposes of this post, and for sanity’s sake, I’m going to try to flesh out which music services are right for different types of music listeners. Keep in mind that I’m not an audiophile; I’m just a regular music listener, like you probably are.
Editors’ note (November 21, 2011): Based on reader feedback, I’ll be working on adding Zune Pass and Slacker Premium to this post. Check back soon for updates!
Also, note that I’m not addressing free radio services like Pandora, Last.fm, TuneIn Radio, Shoutcast, and the like. Many of these services are great, but they’re more about tapping into a preprogrammed stream; I’m talking about on-demand services that let you choose your own music.
Before you start
Before we present some of our favorite choices, a few words of advice:
Make sure your service of choice is available on your device(s): Listen to music on your Android smartphone? iPhone? Apple TV? Roku? Sonos? Mac? Many of these services are supported on a wide variety of devices, but few of them are supported on every device. Before you pick one, make sure it works on your device of choice (via an app, software, or a browser).
Make sure your favorite artists are available on your service of choice:
Some notable artists–The Beatles, Metallica, Led Zeppelin, Coldplay–are hard (or downright impossible) to find on some services. Search the archives to make sure your must-have artists are available–or be prepared to start ripping some CDs.
Don’t be afraid to experiment: Many of these services have free-to-try or free-on-PC versions. Giving them a spin is pretty much a no-risk affair. And even the pay services don’t come with contracts or early-termination fees, as a cell phone does. If you sign up for, say, Rhapsody and you end up not liking it after a month, cancel it–you won’t be out more than $10.
Music-streaming services
Music-streaming services are a great way to discover new music without actually taking space on your computer, or even buying the music outright. There are free ways to do this, as well as paid ways to do this.Spotify
Spotify broke onto the scene in a big way in July 2011, when it was finally released in the U.S.
It offers tight integration with Facebook; songs I listen to in Spotify show up in real time on my Facebook Timeline (which can be a good or bad thing, depending on what embarrassing thing I happen to be listening to). In fact, when I open my Spotify desktop app, more than 50 of my Facebook friends are actively using it. By comparison, only seven of my Facebook friends are using Rdio, (which I’ll get to later), with only a couple actively using it.
Spotify finds songs that are stored on your computer; it feels like an iTunes replacement, plus it adds the ability to find music you might not have in your collection, for free. It’s like if iTunes and 1990s-era Napster had a baby, except you can’t keep the streaming tracks.
With the free service, there’s a limit to how much music you can listen to (unlimited for six months; after that, it’s 10 hours per month). It’s ad-supported unless you pay $4.99 per month, and if you want to stream to your mobile devices (check if your device is compatible), it’s $9.99 per month.
Who should use Spotify: Do you own a lot of music and want to incorporate it with music you don’t have? Do you have a lot of playlists already created in iTunes? Spotify lets you import playlists you’ve already created. Also, if you’re a stickler for audio quality, playback on Spotify (320Kbps streams on the premium service) is a tad better than on Rdio. But for casual listeners, the differences are negligible. And with more than 15 million songs in its database, it shouldn’t be hard to find music, even if you have more-offbeat tastes. Think of it as an iTunes replacement. And if you want to listen from something other than a phone or computer, Squeezebox and Sonos offer Spotify support.
Spotify’s desktop app and integration of local music can really help fill in the typical gaps of subscription music libraries. You can’t play The Beatles or Led Zeppelin on Mog or Rdio, but you’ll find them on Spotify if you have those artists in your personal collection. If you’re an iTunes lover who also loves free music to add to your collection, Spotify is a great option.
Who shouldn’t use Spotify: The ads–present only in the free computer-based version–can be jarring and come from seemingly out of nowhere. If I’m listening to Kanye West, the odds of me wanting to hear an ad for a country music singer I’ve never heard of are slim to none. And they also seem to happen quite often; I sometimes hear two ads in a row.
There’s no browser-based version of Spotify, so if you’re not allowed to download apps on your machine (say, at work), then you can’t use it. Also, Spotify makes you use your Facebook log-in to register. If that makes you uncomfortable, then look elsewhere. Also, if you’d like to purchase songs or albums directly from Spotify, there’s no way to do that (in the U.S.). Yet. More
