Streaming music has replaced my music collection
by Volker Weber
I am currently signed into 6 music services on my Sonos: 8tracks, AUPEO!, Deezer, Shuffler.fm, Spotify, The Hype Machine.
There are 15 more available (to me): Audible, 7digital, Amazon Cloud Player, Concert Vault, DAR.fm Record Radio, Hearts of Space, Juke, Last.fm, Murfie, Napster by Rhapsody, Quobuz, Rdio, simfy, Stitcher Smart Radio, WiMP.
On top of that, there is SONOS Lab with 7 more: Calm Radio, Daytrotter, hotelradio.fm, iHeartRadio, MLB.com Gameday Audio, rara.com, RUSC. And finally, I know of two major players in development that I cannot talk about.
That's 30 music services, that SONOS players can stream right from the internet, independently from your smartphone. And that's just here. In the US, there are some services I cannot even tap into.
Nokia Mix Radio, what are you waiting for?
Comments
Okay, point taken. But what about offline usage?
I love music, but I use my music at least 50% away from home and away from Wifi (car, plane, running,..). I rarely get along with my 1GB data plan and don't use any streaming at the moment.
What would be the suggestion for such a user profile...?
@Jens the mobile clients usually cache your playlists. They only verify account status periodically. So you can listen to your playlists offline. Works for me, at least with Juke (and Napster/Rhapsody before).
While I know what to expect from traditional radio - a lot of boring playlist oriented and few curated "specialist" music programs - how does this work with streaming services?
Do I have to create a profile and they (pandora?) find suitable music for me and if how do they serve my desire for serendipity so I can discover new (unknown to me) music?
Needs to be said, I listened for over 20 years to John Peel, and during all those years he always had the odd but exciting discovery in his box of records.
Which streaming service could do?
@Bernhard: try them... Usually they all have a one month free testing period. And while most of mainstream players share a good portion of the same music the matching they use is completely different.
AFAIK Pandora uses something called Music DNA to find 'similar' music while last.fm uses the social cloud 'people listening to this song also liked ....'.
Try them for free and find what suits your music style best.
If you got a soundcloud account google for hirahim - sonos - soundcloud
Another great source of music!
Lot's of John Peel archive tracks can be found plus way more ;-)
