Streaming music services for the entire family
Music on tap
Streaming music service catalogues are huge: Spotify alone has more than 20 million tracks! Therefore, chances are that you will find (almost) everything there so you won’t need to buy music anymore. Plus, as the music is sitting in the cloud, there’s no need to make a backup or to reserve gigabytes of free space on your hard drive.
Spotify
Spotify (http://www.spotify.com/uk) is the best-known music service. You can sign up free of charge. However, in the Free version you can only listen to the music on the website, plus there are ads to contend with. The Spotify player lets you compile your own playlists. To avoid ads, there’s the Unlimited version(£4.99 per month), while the Premium formula (£9.99 per month) lets you use the Spotify apps on your smartphone (iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Symbian and BlackBerry). You can register up to three devices per account with Premium, and it also allows you to listen to music offline (up to 3,333 songs per smartphone). Internet radios such as Squeezebox and Sonos are also equipped with a Spotify app. Note. A Spotify account allows you to log in from several computers, but only one device at a time can stream. So if you want to make Spotify available on separate devices simultaneously, you will have to create separate accounts.
Deezer
Deezer (http://www.deezer.com) also boasts a catalogue of approximately 20 million songs. Without an account, you can only listen to 30 seconds of each song. A new free account requires a Facebook login: you can listen without any limitations for 15 days. Alternatively, you can pay £4.14 per month for Premium (without ads), or £8.29 per month for Premium+ (smartphone and tablet access, offline mode). Here again, you’re not allowed to play streams on several devices simultaneously. The free mobile apps are available for iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung. Deezer can also be used on Squeezebox, Sonos and Jawbone.
Grooveshark
If you think Spotify and Deezer are too expensive, try Grooveshark (http://www.grooveshark.com). The free version lets you stream music to your computer as well as to smartphones (via the web app), but again there are lots of ads. The Anywhere version costs $5 or £3.15 per month. It is ad-free and comes with dedicated iOS and Android apps. Tip 1. Grooveshark currently still allows multiple computers with the same account to stream music. Tip 2. Although it’s not really legal, the free Chrome extension Grooveshark Downloader (http://www.groovesharkdownload.net) also lets you download the streamed songs.
Xbox Music
A relative newcomer is Xbox Music (http://www.xbox.com/en-GB/music), which offers around 30 million tracks. If you have Windows 8 or a tablet running Windows 8 RT, the built-in Music app lets you stream music free - not all the songs are available, but at least half are. For £8.99 per month, you can buy a “Pass” which lets you stream all the songs and which also works on Windows Phone smartphones and the Xbox 360.
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