I am an avid music listener. And, because I spend most of my day in front of my laptop working from home, I listen to 99% of my music by streaming it from the internet. So, I think I have a pretty good idea what makes a good online music service and what doesn’t.
In future articles I’ll write about how you can use all this to have awesome music playing in your house, making music selection for parties so much easier.
Deezer
Based in Paris (I believe) and probably the first to actually allow foreign countries to sign up, I love Deezer. I pay R60 a month (about $5) and it’s just plain easy to use. The selection is huge, and the quality is amazing.
RadioTunes.com
This service has completely replaced my wife’s radio in the car. She streams the music from her app on her iPhone playing it over bluetooth. And, when she goes running, she listens to music on RadioTunes.
You don’t have to pay to get decent quality music, though if you’ve got decent bandwidth and some extra cash (about $10 a month or +/- R150 a month) then I would DEFINITELY subscibe.
DI.fm
A “sister site” Â or a subsidiary of RadioTunes.com, or maybe even the original RadioTunes, who knows, but this is my personal favourite. I use it to play music depending on my mood, and how much work I’d like to get done.
The “DI” stands for “Digitally Imported”and this site plays dance/electronic music, and if you’re looking for any type of dance music, you’re sure to find it. The styles range from dubstep to trip-hop to 90’s dance and even Latino.
The benefit is, subscribing to either DI.fm or RadioTunes gets you a subscription to both.
Google Play Music
I tried this subscription service, but I had to stop it after a couple of months. I just didn’t find it as easy to use as I expected. Even being the cheapest of the lot, trying to find tracks and/or play playlists of a specific style was just painful. I was upset about that, because I’m a huge Google fan. 🙂
Apple Music
I haven’t actually tried Apple Music yet. With so many to choose from, and the fact that I use an Android phone (LG G4 at the moment), I haven’t felt the urge to try out the service, even though you get a WHOPPING 3 months free trial. NOBODY offers that kind of deal these days.