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3 High Speed Internet Music Service Solutions
Listening to music online has never been simpler with plenty of great services that offer thousands of albums, artists, and songs to listen to no matter where you are. These three services are currently the best Internet music services available. Each service has its strengths and weaknesses, so before you decide on a solitary service, check out these features to help you decide whether you want to subscribe to one service or go for a mix for a complete listening experience. For mobile listeners, be warned: listening to these services over your mobile connection will consume tons of bandwidth. Unless you have unlimited service, it is best to listen to these services while at home on your high speed internet connection.
(Courtesy of Flickr User: abulhussain)
Spotify
Spotify is a Swedish music start up that opened to select few countries in Europe before finally making the jump across the Atlantic to debut in the United States earlier this year. Before the jump the service boasted 10 million registered users with about 1 million paying subscribers. Spotify is currently available on all major desktop operating systems and mobile devices, including the recently discontinued WebOS.
Music on the service can be searched through according to genre, album, artist, or even the record label. For music that is not already owned in a person's own collection, links in the desktop client make it easy to purchase from partnered sites such as Amazon MP3 Store.
The service for the desktop and mobile versions is truly superb, as long as a person has access to a high speed internet connection. The true genius of Spotify is its music discovery tool, which analyzes music already on your hard drive and the music you've favorite on the service to recommend new songs and top ten lists for you to enjoy. This makes it a great way to find new music related to your current tastes.
Currently Spotify offers six months of unlimited service for free before an hourly cap is placed in effect. Users who want to continue using the service past the monthly hour cap will need to register for premium service, which has the added benefit of removing ads.
(Courtesy of Flickr User: SqueegyX)
Pandora Radio
Pandora Radio offers a similar service to Spotify but instead of analyzing your own music collection, it asks you to name a song or an artist that you enjoy. From there, the service analyzes music similar in genre to the song or artist and provides other songs for you to listen to, where you can decide to like them, dislike them, or skip them.
The service is completely free to try on the web and for mobile users but there is a premium service that makes a desktop application available and removes all of the ads between listening. Free users also have a monthly hour cap of 40 hours per month, but if that limit is reached a user can continue to stream for the modest payment of $0.99.
(Courtesy of Flickr User: eng1ne)
Last.fm
Last.fm differs from the previous two as music selection services in that it doesn't provide you with new music to listen to. Instead, it tracks the music you listen to on various services that support Scrobbling, and then lets you listen to those tracks on their site for free. You can share these tracks with friends and see what friends are listening to as well, so Last.fm serves more as a social networking service for music, more so than a discovery service for your own personal tastes. Both Pandora and Spotify have extensions designed to scrobble tracks you listen to on those services to Last.fm so you can share your music preferences with your friends.
This is a guest article by Ruben Corbo, a writer for the website Broadband Expert where you can find high speed internet providers in your area and compare prices on different deals for your wireless internet necessities.
