On-demand streamed music services compared
How Xbox Music stacks up against the competition
Feature As Microsoft Xbox Music upon the masses this week, streaming over 30 million songs to groovetastic gamers and Windows PC users, we decided to see how it stacks up against the competition.
The market is awash with Spotify-style streaming services, which vary in catalogue numbers, mobile support, pricing and their respective feature lists. The latest must-have option is an offline mode, allowing listeners to build playlists and cache their tracks for enjoyment in times of no signal.
Some will let you access their track catalogues for nowt, though there's always a catch: gratis songs are either offered solely as short-duration samples, or impose advertising upon you.
And don't forget, download services like iTunes and Amazon MP3 may be a better bet if you're interested in buying tracks to keep, or you don't want to cough up month in, month out.
And there are some darn fine free internet radio stations, some without ads, such as the excellent, eclectic donation-funded Radio Paradise, out there. You lose the ability to choose songs, but then you'll get to hear material you'd otherwise miss.
As you can see from our table below, punters will generally fork out at least a fiver for a standard unlimited subscription, a price that tends to double for premium mobile support features.
Services such as Grooveshark and Last.fm offer fabulous value for money, although the latter is more focused on customised radio stations based on musical preference, rather than directly choosing individual tunes. The former is priced in Dollars as well, so there may be additional currency conversion charges, depending on which credit card you use to pay for it.
Pure stakes a claim for a spot on the value podium too, but as we discovered in our Spotify vs Pure Music head-to-head review, the quality of tunes offered on the digital radio mogul's platform leaves much to be desired.
The quality and codec used is an important factor when splashing out and considering many of these companies remain rather hazy on specifics, it's often best to simply have a listen first, as long as the service allows you to, of course. Most provide an option for up to 320kb/s, though.
Either way, with Xbox Music's vast catalogue, competitive freemium model and broad features, it certainly looks primed to make a huge noise in the market. However, unless you'll definitely make use of it on your mobile device(s), it may be tempting to save a few bob elsewhere. ®
COMMENTS
Music Unlimited is the mutts nutts.
Microsoft (as usual) are playing games with their claims of 30m titles. As if you look, lots of it are region specific, so their 30m is just the sum of all the regions. If you are a UK user, expect less than 10m.
It's also about the content, rather than pure numbers. And with Sony owning so many labels, much of their music in Music Unlimited is exclusive to that platform (they of course have all the stuff the others have).
So for me, Music Unlimited is where it's at.
My XBOX makes so much noise that I din't think I could hear any music over it. Damned thing is like a wind tunnel.
I believe newer versions are quieter, though.
Region specific nonsense
Do me a favour. Look up some of these artists in the UK on these services for me.
Yoko Kanno
Yuki Kajiura
Akino Arai
Ayumi Hamasaki
BoA
Eufonius
Hitomi
I've & Kotoko
Maaya Sakamoto
Origa
Perfume
Rie Tanaka
Susumu Hirasawa
The Indigo
Utada Hikaru
Granted these are mainly associated with anime soundtracks but most of them should come up on a search. If they don't appear (or have very little content) on the UK music services then I don't give a shit about ANY of these services. The problem is usually how region specific these services are and the stupid licensing issues. It's complete bollocks!
Re: Music Unlimited is the mutts nutts.
i did wonder about that 30m figure. good old MS.
Can you really describe Spotify as free with ads if it has the excessive "5 plays of a track in your entire life" policy? If they made it per month, per year, or even per decade I could accept it, but since it never expires I just refuse to use it.
I was actually a paying customer, but I decided I didn't want to invest in creating playlists and letting it learn about my tastes if they introduced such a terrible policy to the free version. Who knows what other terrible ideas they might have in the future? And what if I ever had a month without paying - perhaps a month where I knew I wasn't going to use it as much. The knowledge of forever locking out a favourite song in the free version would cause me to be terrified of using the free one, which makes Spotify useless for occasional users who would probably be a good source of money over time and would be invested in your software meaning you would have a source of customers for advertising and who could potentially become full-time paying users. As it is, they've totally blocked that market out and made such users turn to piracy.
