Having music and other media stored on your phone for ready usage is healthy and advisable, but considering the limited space on our Android phones and the myriad of streaming services that offer all the music in the world that are available for free or for a small cost, it is best that we stick to streaming music and movies rather than slowing down our phones by storing these on the memory. Spotify dominates the arena of streaming music, but there are plenty of streaming apps available for your Android. We provide here a step-by-step breakdown of the top apps so you can choose for your specific needs.
Apple Music
This app isn’t just for Apple users, as there is an app on the Play Store. The streaming service has a good foundation, with the iTunes store selling music for more than a decade before the app was launched in 2015. With its collection of over 30 million songs (slightly less than that on the iTunes store – 50 million songs), it has great potential. Apple Music also has some unique features such as Connect, which is a blogging service that attempts to bring the artists closer to their fans and followers by allowing them to release songs, lyrics and other art on the service. The Beats 1 internet radio station also plays in over 100 countries on the app. With all these features and a continuously evolving interface, Apple Music stands a good chance to take a major share in the streaming business.
Spotify
Spotify is a free, ad-supported streaming app that also offers a subscription. The great thing is that the range of songs and albums offered is the same for paying and non-paying users, but this may change with plans to restrict future albums to subscribers. The free app has some drawbacks, including bad sound quality and ads that bother you almost every turn. The app also can not be used offline unless individual songs are downloaded.
The web player and desktop player has the option of syncing your playlists on the phone with it, so you can listen to your favorite songs anywhere you want. There is also radio and the discovery algorithm is top of the line, allowing you to construct personalized playlists. Finally, the family sharing subscription model lets you have six connections for $15 a month, competing with Apple Music and Google Play Music.
Google Play Music
This streaming app has now 35 million songs. The subscription charges are the same as that for Spotify, with the additional benefit that you have access to Youtube Red, which means free access to Google’s Youtube video content and background play, something that has been bothersome about the Youtube app for a long time.
Soundcloud and Soundcloud Go
This is a somewhat different streaming app, that lets you discover new artists. Soundcloud is free while the Go version is paid and offers an ad-free experience. Artists pay to put their tracks on the streaming site, and users can listen and comment on them, and download if the artists allow it. This is one of the best website to know latest music.
Tidal
You can subscribe with a PayPal account or credit card details. It offers a basic version of $9.99 and a high fidelity version of $19.99. A month-long trial period is available, where you can play videos. The interface is highly intuitive and interesting.
The streaming services seem to offer different content for different needs. For example, everybody uses YouTube and the Google Play Music lets you access that content seamlessly. Apple Music, on the other hand, is all music and there are no videos. If you want to discover new artists, which is something we all like to do sometimes, there is SoundCloud, whereas Spotify just seems to work best, allowing us to sync playlists with ease and offering high quality content at throwaway prices. There is no best streaming service, and these are the best you would want.
