Jolley FrankieWe used to listen to music on cassettes and CDs. A serious music lover’s collection could take up as much space in an apartment as a home library. Then came the time of mp3, and a couple of hundred favorite albums easily fit into a player the size of a cigarette pack. Now even this way of listening to music has become obsolete: it has been replaced by online streaming services.
These are intelligent online music libraries with a variety of useful features, which instantly provide material of any genre. Streaming services allow you to play music on your smartphone, tablet, laptop or other similar gadget. There is no need to download albums to HDD, all music is available for a small subscription fee in a network library in a convenient form.
Spotify
Sweden’s Spotify is the leader among online music services. Founded by Daniel Eck, formerly of μTorrent, the service was launched in 2008.
Spotify offers streaming music, podcasts, radio and playlists tailored to the user’s tastes. Any platform is supported: Windows, Android, iOS, OS X, Linux, PlayStation, Symbian, etc. The Spotify library has more than 30 million tracks. Music can be searched by artist, album, genre, playlist, or record label. We have Twitter, Last.fm, and Facebook integration, so you can share tracks and make playlists with other users.
Aplle music
Launched five months ago, Apple’s streaming service is considered a close competitor to Spotify. In addition to streaming access to the catalogs of the online store iTunes Store (37 million tracks), in the disposal of users gets web-radio Beats 1. Themed playlists are compiled by experts from leading publications including Rolling Stone and DJ Mag. The For You section includes recommended music, and My Music shows downloaded tracks for offline playback and available streaming content. To contact Apple Music, iPhone owners can use the Siri voice assistant.
Google Play Music
Features of Google Play Music, announced in 2011, are a convenient interface, working with audio-streaming (320 kbps) and the ability to download music to the cloud online storage (up to 50 thousand tracks). Streaming content from a vast catalog of 35 million tracks is available in All Access paying mode (189 rubles per month), taking into account the geographical area of the user.
The service is “friendly” with Android, iOS, can work in a web browser and is supported by many media players.
Tidal
Tidal was launched in October 2014 by Aspiro (Norway/Sweden). It was soon acquired by Project Panther Ltd, led by rapper Jay Z. Besides Jay Z, Tidal is co-owned by a host of stars, including Beyonce, Madonna, and Daft Punk.
Tidal is good for fans of quality sound. Tidal has a library of more than 40 million songs and 90 thousand music videos available. Tidal Premium version ($ 9.99/month) allows you to play tracks with a bitrate of 320 kbps (AAC). Tidal HiFi version costs twice as much and is designed for audiophiles: it plays tracks in FLAC format, comparable in sound quality to CD. In March of this year Tidal had 580,000 subscribers, 17,000 of whom used Tidal HiFi.
Pandora .
Pandora Media Inc. was founded 15 years ago in California. The service is based on the automated recommendation system Music Genome Project. A trick of Pandora is a careful selection of audio content according to the tastes of the user, who is offered to evaluate the proposed tracks. The service takes into account up to 400 characteristics: syncopation, tonality, vocal harmonies, etc. Performers are selected based on this data. In November 2014, the service’s catalog consisted of more than 1.5 million tracks.
SoundCloud
This is a special project that’s not so much about listening to music as it is about uploading it to the network. In December 2014, there were 175 million SoundCloud listeners. The catalog of the service has 100 million tracks and is the largest among similar resources.
Where does so much music come from? SoundCloud is a great resource for young artists to upload their material and share the audio tracks they create with other users. The service connects easily with Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. Each track gets a unique URL code to advertise on the networks.
Registered users can upload up to 180 minutes of audio to their profile and use SoundCloud widgets on their websites and blogs. You can comment on any part of the track displayed as a graphical sound wave. A paid subscription ($59/year) increases downloaded music time to 6 hours and opens up unlimited download access at a $145/year fee.