Music is important to many Canadians, and on-the-go listening from a smartphone or mobile device is something that’s easy to quickly get hooked on. Whether you’re working, partying, relaxing or exercising – it’s nice to have something to listen to for some added motivation.
But while most avid music listeners admit to having an iTunes account, purchasing music for download can get pricey. A new generation of online music services is touting catalogues of millions of songs, largely accessible via WiFi or cellular streaming, to laptops, tablets or mobile phones. Though not every service is available to Canadians yet, the list of competitors runs long.
Because most people (young and old) carry a cell phone with them almost everywhere they go having the ability to open an app and begin streaming a song is much more attractive, cheaper, and convenient than purchasing songs either online or at a store and saving or sync’ing them on your device for playback. That being said, many of these services were only available in the United States but many are now finally making their way across the border.
So, there seems to be many versatile music streaming options available here in Canada at the moment and they can be broken down into several different categories. Listening to radio stations via their live stream, uploading all of your personal music collection to the cloud and streaming it to your devices, subscribing to a user-based curated service and finally playing directly from YouTube.
So, for the first category, it is interesting to note that many radio stations world-wide have made their broadcast available on the web for anyone to listen to either via their website or a mobile app. And so with that said, one app that comes to mind that can be downloaded from either from the Google Play or Apple Store is called Tunein Radio. This handy app provides over 100,00 radio stations and four million on-demand programs and podcasts worldwide to search, listen, favorite or record along with the ability to create and stream your own content from.
Certainly one of my every day go-to apps especially when I can conveniently schedule and record my favorite shows. There are both free and paid versions so if you want to find out more just search for it from within either App Store or visit their website at www.tunein.com
So both Apple and Google now offer the ability for you to upload your music to their servers so you can conveniently play it back to your devices at your leisure. Apple calls it iTunes Match and it has a limit of 25,000 songs costing about 27 dollars per year. One neat feature to this service is if you upload a low quality song Apple will actually match or replace it with their own higher quality one providing users with the best quality music. Playback can be through all of Apple’s devices and iTunes.
Google Play Music, on the other hand, will also allow you to upload a large supply of your songs, for free, with playback from the web and mobile apps giving anyone with an Internet connection the ability to stream their music. If you decide to pay for their premium subscription of 9.99 per month you get access to their entire music collection (which is in the millions), along with your uploaded music, custom radio stations and song recommendations. To find more about Apples iTunes Match you can visit https://www.apple.com/ca/itunes/itunes-match/ or Google Play Music at https://play.google.com/about/music/allaccess
There are many and they seem to be growing by the day. To name just a few of the more popular ones would include Songza, Rdio, Slackr, Groovrshark, and finally the most recent and most popular Spotify. Most of these have pre-designed or curated playlists sometimes called stations that can suggest to you the type of music you want to hear based on you previous listening sessions or based on the type of mood you pick. All available to stream on a variety of platforms with various monthly subscription payment plans.
