Spotify & other music streaming services

[BlueMax]

I firmly believe that with the ever increasing broadband speeds and its popularity, the days of individually stored music such as on CDs or ripped on HDs will soon be obsolete. Why bother to store when you can instantly choose from millions of albums and tracks online!

I am still waiting for an invite to Spotify; but in the meantime came across a few others. Some are available in the US only. Here is list with number of stored tracks in brackets:

Grooveshark (22 million)
http://listen.grooveshark.com

Rhapsody, online music service (9 million)
http://www.rhapsody.com/welcome.html

Pandora (700,000) US only
http://www.pandora.com

Spotify (8 million)
http://www.spotify.com
Ogg Vorbis q5 (~160kbps) for free users, and q9 (~320kbps) for Premium
£10/month for 320kbps

Last.fm (7 million)
http://www.last.fm/music
MP3 128kbps

Napster (9 million)
http://www.napster.co.uk

MOG (7.4 million)
http://mog.com

Deezer (7 million)
http://www.deezer.com/en

we7, UK (3.5 million)
http://www.we7.com

Jango
http://www.jango.com

Myspace Music
http://www.myspace.com/

Most offer limited use free of charge, but charge a fee for full access and at higher bit rates.
I have used only a couple of them so far. Much to improve but early days as yet. But shape of things to come, I feel .......

If you have used any of them please feel free to post your comments and tips, if any.

[anon]

Grooveshark (22 million)
http://listen.grooveshark.com

Best one. A huge music collection, no country limitations, no need to install anything other than Flash... what else could you ask for? They were supposedly going to implement "inactivity disconnections", i.e. if you didn't click something in the UI for five minutes, music playback would stop - but that has yet to happen for me.

Your list is missing Mixtape.me and Seeqpod, by the way. :)

[Stabber]

Grooveshark is great but i think spotify is better . I just love the way spotify organizes everything not to mention that with the latest version you can import local files and share your playlists and songs to twitter and facebook .

[anon]

share your playlists and songs to twitter and facebook .

Not an advantage for me :P

Personally, I found Spotify to be greatly hyped. Half the tracks I was looking for weren't in its library, and I want to listen to music, not learn the latest way to cheat the country restriction every week. :dry:

[Stabber]

haha that's true , every 2 weeks i have to find a vpn trial in order to get a uk ip :P . spotify lacks only in trance/electronic music i think . For rock/metal it's great

[BlueMax]

Thanks to 'Stabber' I just joined Spotify Free service :)
Trying to get used to Spotify interface, so no comments right now.

I am in the UK; so hopefully I don't have to face the probs that you two mentioned.:unsure:

[anon]

I am in the UK; so hopefully I don't have to face the probs that you two mentioned.:unsure:

Right, you won't have to bother with proxies.

[its]

add a new one to that list called "rdio.com" only in the united states so far but soon to open up. from the creators of skype.

we need spotify in north america team up with google :P

[VSpace]

My beef with alot of the "streamers" is bit rate/quality. I've found alot of them skimp when it comes to maintaining CD quality.

To me, 128bps is the bare minimum, 160 is the benchmark. (or equivalent). I've found most like the 64-96 range. :(

Any of these mentioned top notch?

Thanks for posting the list. :)

[BlueMax]

Lossy compression such as MP3s served a useful purpose when the bandwidth was low and storage capacity of portable players were small.

But why now?!

BTW. anyway of knowing the actual bit rates?

[anon]

BTW. anyway of knowing the actual bit rates?

Run a packet sniffer, stream a song, save it as a file, and open it in your favorite media player.

Since everyone can upload songs to Grooveshark, it's a pretty "colorful" service when it comes to bitrates.

[Nhdj743]

Pandora gets a thumbs up from me.