Listening to music makes you feel more energetic. It brings you motivation while working out, gambling with PlayAmo bonuses, or completing work duties. Want to make your experience better? Then pick one of these services.
SoundCloud
Let’s start with the not-so-obvious options. SoundCloud is an open music service for artists and listeners. Here you’ll find a lot of independent underground musicians, podcasts, playlists, mixes, radio show recordings, and more.
There is a web version and mobile apps for Android and iOS, you can like, repost and comment on tracks and chat with other users in messenger. There is also an algorithm for recommending tracks, but (judging by my personal experience) it works worse than in other popular streaming services.
Bandcamp
This tool in the music environment is considered one of the most honest by its financial model. Spotify, Apple Music, and other streaming services have an opaque payment system: for millions of listens an artist can get only a couple thousand dollars, but an indie musician gets almost nothing. Bandcamp, on the other hand, has a clear and simple model: the company offers artists a platform for the direct sale of albums and takes a standard commission of 15% on each transaction.
For ordinary users, it’s a service with published albums that you can listen to for free in a web version and in the Android and iOS apps. There are few popular artists, but there is a whole archive of indie, undiscovered ambient, black metal and other joys. If you’re ready to search, go ahead.
Spotify
Spotify is the only online tool that has managed so far to compete with Google and Apple. The reason for this is not only the huge music catalog, but also the courage with which the developers are introducing new features.
This is where thematic playlists, a music section for athletes, game soundtracks, a weekly review of sensational albums, and many other innovations first appeared. So we recommend this service to all music lovers who want to be always at the cutting edge of progress.
Last.fm
In the recent past, this service was very popular among music lovers because it was able to track the listening history of almost any music player and make recommendations and playlists based on it.
Thus, Last.fm accumulated a huge database of listeners’ music preferences and learned how to accurately guess which track you’ll want to listen to next. So if you want to never run out of good music, this is the place to go.
Apple Music
Apple Music is one of the largest streaming services with a rich collection of tracks. Access to AM is available with an Apple ID account. When streaming, music is streamed at 256 kbps in AAC format. When the quality of your Internet connection is poor, the bitrate is automatically lowered.
Apple Music has playlists by genre and category, which are manually created. There is also a function of selecting new music based on tracks you have already listened to. The pluses of this service include an intelligent interface of the application and the ability to download tracks to play them without connecting to the Internet. Besides audio tracks, you can watch video clips in Apple Music.
Pandora
Pandora is a place where you can not only listen to your favorite music, but also find new artists who deserve your attention. First, you need to enter the names of several musicians whose work you like the most.
Then the service will start playing similar music and you’ll be able to rate the selection of artists with your ratings. So, the service will be more and more adjusted to your tastes and after a while will be able to make just perfect playlists.
Zvooq
One of our few tools, which could compete with the leaders. Zvooq looks good, sounds good and informs about new high-profile releases on time.
Visitors without registration have an opportunity to listen to a rich collection of music records of the service for free, which is updated daily with new albums. Besides, you can find genre channels, various hit parades and just playlists for different moods.
8tracks
The 8tracks music collection was formed by numerous users of the resource, who were simply allowed to upload their favorite tracks and form playlists from them. That’s how this unique catalog was created, the analogues of which simply do not exist.
You can easily find soundtracks for any activity and mood by means of a convenient filter system and built-in search system. And if you want, you can download your own favorite tunes, so you’ll never have to part with them.
YouTube Music
YouTube Music is essentially a full analogue of Google Music, only together with the music collection in a separate tab you can watch video clips from YouTube’s multimillion-dollar video-hosting database. The tool is available both for iOS and Android smartphones absolutely free of charge. If you subscribe to YouTube Premium, YouTube Music also gets premium status with the cancellation of all restrictions.
The free version of the service doesn’t allow you to listen to music in the background, download tracks to your smartphone for offline listening, and ads are played between songs. There is also no possibility to shuffle tracks in random order.
In general, YouTube Music is an addition to the YouTube service and a logical substitute for the Google Music service. However, any song or video clip can disappear from the database at any moment in case of copyright infringement according to YouTube’s internal policy.
Napster
It’s a great tool that began its attempts to create a music service that would unite people from different parts of the world back in the late 90s. At first, people could just send each other mp3 files, and then more, and eventually it all grew into a big pirated music family. Long court battles with everyone, the lame financial side of the service led to its demise. Rhapsody was bought in 2011, but the name and logo were left almost unchanged, since everyone got used to it.