How to make a young person feel old: Ask what it was like to pay to own a downloaded song.
Streaming music services, for many listeners, have become a powerful alternative to the music download. Would you rather buy 10 songs a month for $10 or tap into a 20-million-song library for the same monthly fee?
If you’d rather rent than own music, here’s a starter kit of major digital music streamers — all available on mobile devices and most available on the Web.
Beats Music
Price: $9.99 a month for unlimited streaming, song downloads and offline use. (A family plan, with up to five users, is available to AT&T; mobile subscribers for $14.99 a month.)
Free trial: Seven days.
No-fee streaming options: None.
Number of songs (estimate): 20 million
Sound quality (bit rate): Up to 320 kbps, with standard-quality mobile streaming at 64 kbps. (At 320 kbps, music will sound as a good as a CD to most ears.)
Comment: If Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine can convince music listeners to dump their $20 earbuds for $300 Beats headphones, anything is possible with their latest project, which debuted in January. Beats Music is actually a fully renovated and retooled MOG, the subscription music service the Beats machine purchased in 2012.
Spotify
Price: Premium ($9.99 a month for on-demand music, downloads, offline); Unlimited ($4.99, on-demand); Free (some on-demand, ads).
Free trial: 30 days for Premium service.
No-fee streaming options: Free mobile streaming
Number of songs (estimate): 20 million
Sound quality (bit rate): 320 kbps (Premium), 96 kbps (mobile)
Comment: May we suggest noise-cancellation headphones to block out the Beats vs. Spotify war? After Beats Music arrived, Spotify responded with free streaming (with ads) on mobile devices — previously available only to Premium subscribers. Then it bought The Echo Nest, the music intelligence data-cruncher that powers music discovery and playlists for many streaming services, including Spotify. With 24 million users, including 6 million paid subscribers, this Swedish colossus remains a top choice.
iTunes Radio
Price: Free (with ads), or pay $24.99 a year for iTunes Match, which stores your music in iCloud, to remove the ads.
Free trial: No
No-fee streaming options: No
Number of songs (estimate): 27 million
Sound quality (bit rate): Up to 256 kbps
Comment: iTunes Radio offers instant access to the world’s largest music library and likely more exclusive new-music releases than any other service. This is more a radio than music service, however, with no on-demand features.
Slacker Radio
Price: Premium ($9.99 a month for on-demand music, download stations, offline); Radio Plus ($3.99 for download stations, offline, unlimited song skips)
Free trial: No
No-fee streaming options: Unlimited Web, mobile streaming (with ads).
Number of songs (estimate): 13 million.
Sound quality (bit rate): 128 kbps
Comment: A smooth interface and custom-station options make up for lower bit-rate streaming and fewer songs. I still use Slacker, which relies more on humans than algorithms for song matches, more than any other no-fee service.
Rdio
Price: Unlimited ($9.99 a month for on-demand music, download tracks, offline listening), Web ($4.99, on-demand). Family plans available.
Free trial: 14 days (Unlimited)
No-fee streaming options: Rdio Free, limited streams without ads for up to six months.
Number of songs (estimate): 20 million
Sound quality (bit rate): 192 kbps
Comment: Rdio hasn’t kept up with Spotify — and, in fact, laid off close to three dozen workers last fall — but it’s hoping a reputation for discovering new music will attract more paying listeners.
Pandora Radio
Price: Pandora One ($3.99 a month or $36 a year for on-demand, but still pauses tracks to reduce royalties if you don’t interact with the player for a while). Premium ($9.99 a month for on-demand music, download stations, offline); Radio Plus ($3.99 a month for download stations, offline, unlimited song skips).
Free trial: No
No-fee streaming options: Unlimited streaming (with ads and pauses)
Number of songs (estimated): 900,000
Sound quality (bit rate): Up to 192 kbps (desktop)
Comment: Pandora, with 73 million users a month, is the most familiar name in Internet radio. Even as the music industry and Pandora fight over royalties in court and Congress, the streaming service continues to grow.
