Pandora - the service that literally opened the box. Pandora is was the first major Internet radio service which was able to generate significant consumer awareness and obtain a large user base. Most people know what Internet radio is because of Pandora. As opposed to a live stream of a real, existing radio station, Pandora creates a "station" for you to listen to from selections in a certain music genre based on your selection of an artist. You can can "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" the selection Pandora makes for you, and this helps Pandora fine-tune its subsequent recommendations. Pandora uses the Music Genome Project to generate its selections based on a list of characteristics in a song.
Pandora's core service is free, but as such, it's not a play-on-demand service. Instead, your listening is limited to the stations you create and the selections Pandora makes for you. You currently can skip to the next song on a station 72 times in a 24-hour period, and listing is further limited to 40 hours/month on mobile devices. And sound quality isn't great compared to other services (128 kbps MP3). There are also occasional ads, but you can disable them by upgrading to Pandora One, which costs $36/year or $3.99/month. Pandora One also slightly increases sound quality to 192 kbps, but only for listening on a PC through a web browser or the desktop app. Finally, Pandora's library only contains around a million songs. All this means Pandora likely won't your be primary listening source, as it doesn't involve any music ownership or on-demand streaming, and sound quality is generally inferior. But it's great as a passive entertainment source, like FM or satellite radio but more personal. Pandora also boasts the largest variety of platforms on which it's available, including all the major mobile platforms.
While it was available in Europe for a few years before finally making its way to the US in 2011, Spotify is probably the most recognized streaming service available today and the standard by which others are judged. At a glance, Spotify is an on-demand streaming service with three tiers to the service. Tier one is free, ad-supported streaming radio through a desktop app. The second, "Unlimited" tier is $4.99/month and provides for listening through a computer with no ads and unlimited skips. The "Premium" tier is $9.99/month, and unlocks on-demand listening, as well as unlimited streaming from mobile apps and a multitude of other devices, along with the ability to download music for offline listening. You can also add on various 3rd party apps to the desktop client that provide additional functionality, and these are generally quite good. Spotify streams music in the Ogg Vorbis format, and each service tier offers streaming at a higher quality - 96 kbps, 160 kbps, and 320 kbps.
Spotify's catalog includes about 20 million songs, making it one of the more robust. Playlists are a major part of the Spotify experience, with the ability to share them and edit shared playlists together with other users. With Spotify's radio system, available to all three tiers, you can create a "station" based on a song, artist, or album, and you have the ability to hit a thumbs or or down on a track to help improve song recommendations. Finally, Spotify provides pretty tight social network integration with Facebook and Twitter (and Twitter #music), if you're into that sort of thing. All in all, Spotify is an extremely robust streaming music service with multiple options. Ultimately, however, if you like the service, you'll only get the most out of it if you cave and sign up for the Premium service by parting with Alexander Hamilton every month.
Rdio is set up similarly to Spotify. Unlike Spotify or Pandora, however, it doesn't have a long-term free service. Instead, new users can try the service for free for up to six months on a computer, after which they have a choice of Web or Unlimited service tiers. For $4.99/month, Rdio Web offers unlimited music streaming with no ads through a computer browser or downloadable desktop client. For $9.99/month, the Unlimited service gets you unlimited mobile streaming, on-demand music, and downloadable music for offline mobile listening. Rdio also has a Family plan, which basically lets you purchase additional Unlimited plans at a discount. Rdio is also integrated with Twitter #music to aid in music discovery, and enables you to follow friends and celebrities to see their playlists. Like Spotify, Rdio has a 20+ million song library, but Rdio takes its radio station features a step further by adding some customization over the stations you create. Ultimately, the two services are extremely similar and it'd be hard to go wrong with either one. That said, I'd give the slight edge to Spotify for sound quality, with Rdio topping out at 192 kbps, but others may find Rdio's superior, more beautiful UI more important.
Google Play Music All Access
Come we now to the newest entry. Not long after Google has established its own music storage locker and music store (see my previous post for more info on what Google now calls its "Standard" music service), it surprisingly beat Apple and Amazon to the punch to launch a streaming service. While the name All Access may be bland, the service is anything but. All Access has only one service tier, unlike the aforementioned services, but if you listen on your mobile (or any other device), you'll need one of the premium services anyway. All Access costs that familiar $9.99/month - but wait!... you can get All Access now for the low, low price of... $7.99/month if you act now! If you sign up before June 30th, that is, as a bonus for early adopters. You can also try the service free for 30 days.In addition to all the features of the standard service, All Access grants unlimited, on-demand streaming to Google's 18+ million song catalog, "smart recommendations" based on your listening tastes, and custom radio with unlimited skips based on an artist, album, or song. You can also download songs for offline listening, and share socially on Google+. If this all sounds familiar, it is. Where All Access differentiates itself is its approach to radio and integration. Like the other services, you can hit thumb up or thumb down to improve recommendations, but you can also customize a station you create by peeking ahead and reordering, adding, or removing songs (basically like a playlist). There are also preexisting stations curated by "experts," and recommended to you based on your listening habits. And, if you already use Google Play Music for storage of your personal library, both search results and (better yet) radio will integrate your own songs. It also doesn't hurt that Google's UI is also extremely pleasing to the eye and intuitive, and streaming sound quality, like purchased songs from Google Play, come in the 320 kbps MP3 variety.
While All Access doesn't offer any new earth-shattering features, what it does do, it does at least as good as its competition, and better in many respects. Taken in whole, though, none of the other services offer as robust a service as Google has, complete with subscription-based streaming and radio, music discovery, social integration (though limited to Google+), large music store, and music storage for personal libraries. The icing on the cake is the on-the-fly radio playlist tweaking and mingling your own music with the streaming catalog. Finally, Google literally just announced that All Access would also be coming to iOS "soon," making the service much more compelling and relevant to the non-Android world. It may be a wash as to whether All Access is worth jumping from one of the other services, but if you don't already use a streaming service and are considering it, or are seeking an all-in-one solution with storage for your own songs, or already use Google Play Music for storage and syncing, it's difficult to see why you'd go anywhere else.
Other Services
There are tons of other similar services out there, many of which also deserve your attention, such as Rhapsody, Last.fm, Slacker, etc. I could easily throw these three on the list, but I'd be approaching redundancy. There are also services from other major companies, namely Microsoft with Xbox Music, formerly Zune Music, which is available for free on Windows 8/RT (supported by ads) and $99.90/year or $10/month for access on Windows Phone and Xbox 360. Xbox Music Pass (the paid subscription), like the others, is an unlimited, on-demand and smart-playlist ad-free radio streaming service. Microsoft also has a huge music store (30+ million songs), but its services are limited to its own platforms, at least for the time being. Microsoft offers only decent quality, streaming at 192 kbps WMA. Sony also has what it calls Music Unlimited (formerly Qriocity), with its Access plan for $4.99/month (available on desktops and the PS3) and its Premium plan for $9.99/month, with access on desktops, PS3, Sony-connected devices, Android, and iOS. Again, Music Unlimited incorporates on-demand and smart-playlist radio, with one unique touch - channels - based on genre, era, and mood. Sony also seriously upped the ante on its sound quality, formerly one of its weak links, with the option to stream at 320 kbps AAC on desktop, PS3, and Android. I originally used Music Unlimited myself, before switching to Google All Access for its incorporation of my existing library.
Finally, as most of these services have either a free tier or a free trial period, I encourage you to try as many as possible before landing on the one that best suits you.
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