Definitely the right Streaming Music Service [Battlemodo]

The era of listening to any song, at any moment, in any location is fast approaching. While we’re not quite there yet, a handful of on-demand music services have come close. So we put them head-to-head to determine who’s best.

We narrowed it all the way down to four main ones- Grooveshark , MOG , Rdio and Rhapsody – which supply on demand streaming on multiple platforms. We ignored services that worked on a limited number of operating systems and devices (Napster, Zune), and others that functioned more as custom-tailored radio services (Pandora, Slacker, Last.FM).

How’d we select these four services? They all use an analogous and successful formula.

For a monthly fee, each offers access to millions of streaming songs that may play to your browser or from different audio devices. All four have deals with the most important record labels and distributors, in order that they get a few of the big releases. They all provide some kind of quick search functionality, which permits you to fetch results as you type in a search string. And they all have artist playlists and/or Pandora-style radio, which builds lists based around artists or songs. Now that we’ve got that out of ways, let’s discuss the individual pros and cons of each:

MOG

In terms of specs, MOG has the advantage. They’ve more songs than everyone except Rhapsody and they stream at higher bitrates, that means better sound on nice speakers and headphones. At worst, it sounds good and at best it sounds excellent. Lots of the major new releases are available in on their Tuesday release dates, and they be capable of snag an occasional pre-release stream. In addition they provide hand-picked album recommendations daily for those searching for new music.

The iOS and Roku apps, if not life changing, are serviceable apps that do their job and mostly don’t between you and your music. Meanwhile, their Chrome web app (which matches in any browser) is astounding. It’s well designed, provides a lot of visuals and large, clickable buttons; it’s blazing fast and moves from screen to screen with smooth animations.

While all of the apps are well thought-out and executed, the major site (which most people interact with, presumably) is a multitude. The hunt and navigation process is simply too text-heavy, interactive elements (like play/add buttons) might possibly be too small, and songs play through a flash-based pop-out window, which tends to wander off amongst your other open windows.

Also, the social aspect of MOG’s site feels undercooked compared to Rdio. While it provides much of a similar social information that Rdio provides, that info is harder to get and the presentation is lacking.

Rdio

Rdio’s web UI is easily-designed, and navigation is silky smooth. Load a track and it starts playing in a module on the left side of your browser window. In case you hop to another page inside Rdio, the music keeps playing without so much as a stutter. You furthermore mght have a ” collection,” which corrals your favorite songs and albums. The mobile app may be a winner, combining all of the social and search elements of the online-based version with a UI that comes on the point of mimicking the iOS music player (always a favorable thing).

Rdio is all about simplifying the experience right down to two core elements, listening and exploration/sharing via social elements. Which you can add other users as friends just like you’ll on Twitter. Whenever you log in to the location, you’re greeted with a colorful mosaic of album art that either shows your most played songs/albums, your folks’ most played songs/albums, or that of the complete Rdio network. For the casual music fan, this can be a good distance to not sleep on not just what’s new, but in addition to grasp what the folks you surround yourself with are into.

Essentially the mostsome of the most glaring flaw in Rdio is streaming over 3G. While they deliver 256kbps streams over wi-fi inside the browser/desktop/mobile apps, the 3G streams are of a lower quality that the company won’t disclose. The adaptation is noticeable.

They actually have a smaller library than MOG and Rhapsody, which isn’t a total inconvenience with regards to the large, current releases. But once you start digging throughout the back catalogues of older musicians and more obscure/independent releases, you have got (somewhat) more luck with MOG or Rhapsody.

And one last minor gripe: I’m happy with keeping commenting and what not to a minimum. But for features together with recommending albums to a pal, receiving alerts via email is a bit of janky. How hard is it to create a notifications inbox?

Rhapsody