Orb | Streaming Music | Music Streaming Service Comparison
Music Streaming Service Comparison
There are a lot of music streaming websites on the Internet. There are some sites that are geared towards a wide audience of listeners, while others focus on a particular niche. There are music streaming services that charge a monthly fee, and there are others that find funding elsewhere, like from advertising.
This comparison guide takes a look at some of the more popular streaming music websites and a handful of sites that were worth including because of their unique offering to the streaming music community. For each site this article will explain the pros and cons of each site to help you make an informed decision on which site will best fit your music lightening needs.
Pandora Streaming Music
Pandora provides streaming music by first asking the user to write in an artist or song. Pandora then plays a continuous stream of music from that artist and other similar artists using an algorithm from the Music Genome Project.
The user can then customize their experience by either giving a song a “thumbs up” or a “thumbs down”. These choices help narrow down the types of songs the user will hear.
Pandora’s service is free and supported through visual ads and the occasional 30-second audio advertisement. Their service can also be played on most smart phone through Apps and is supported by Orb Music. There is a paid subscription service that removes advertisements and gives the user the ability to skip more songs per hour.
We7 Streaming Music
We7 is a very similar, yet newer, service to Pandora. The user is prompted to choose an artist or song and additional similar songs and artists are played based on We7’s own algorithm.
We7 lacks the feature to customize your streaming experience by rating songs. But it does offer the ability to replay a song you have just heard, which Pandora does not.
We7 also focuses on creating pre-made streaming selections that collect music for different genres, no matter how obscure.
We7 is free to its users and is supported through visual and audio advertisements.
Last.fm Streaming Music
Last.fm is another streaming music website that provides a free music discovery program to their users. Unlike the previous websites, you must sign up for a free membership on Last.fm before you can begin to stream music.
In order to customize your audio stream Last.fm will ask you to list a bunch of artists that you like. From that, it uses its own algorithm to find similar artists that it think you will like.
As each song plays the listening page fills with a large amount of information about the artist including user comments and a ton of photos. Sharing your favorite bands and singers is very much encouraged on Last.fm.
Last.fm’s primary advantage is their Scrobbler application which takes information from the library of music from your computer and imports it to Last.fm. This gives you the ability to really share with your friends all the music you listen to, whether streaming online or on your laptop.
The free experience is supported by audio, video, and graphic ads.
Yahoo! Music Radio Streaming Music
Yahoo! offers a comprehensive music and music video streaming service. The easiest way to access the service is to visit their music section and either choose a video to watch or an artist you like. From there you can create a radio station based on that artist and similar artists will play as part of a continuous stream of music.
Their service is completely free and supported by graphic and video ads.
Like other streaming music services Yahoo! gives you a limited number of times you can skip a song (this is based on agreements they have with record labels). But with Yahoo! Music the number is displayed right on the skip button so you can be more careful in your choices.
Yahoo! Music Radio also has many radio stations that go beyond music such as news and sports talk radio.