The time of MP3 players with their memory saturated with poorly stored music is over. The most common practice is now streaming music, both at home and on the go. We present in this article our favorite applications to play music tracks from your smartphone, without occupying the internal storage space of the device.
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In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in the format vinyl, which is gaining more and more followers among young music lovers who appreciate its retro side and its sound quality. The other media (cassettes, CDs, etc.) are neglected by the general public, who turn massively towards the consumption of music in streaming.
The democratization of access to Internet mobiles with a volume of significant data (greater than 20 GB/month) has helped to change uses. Users can now stream music for several hours a day, without exhausting their monthly allocated envelope. Streaming platforms generally reference tens of millions of titles. They are able to learn the tastes of users to recommend new products that they might like. They can also create a radio personalized broadcasting a mix based on the listening history.
All the apps presented in this article require at least one registration. To take full advantage of all the possibilities offered, it may be interesting to take out a paid subscription. However, it is often possible to listen to music in streaming without cost, provided that you accept advertising breaks. In the rest of this article, we present several different services, available both on android and iOS.
Deezer – The French music streaming platform
One of the most important players in streaming music is French! Indeed, the headquarters of Deezer, whose beginnings on the Web date back to 2007, is based in Paris. Free registration gives access to 56 million titles in random play only. The diffusion regular advertisements then makes it possible to monetize the service.
Access to the paid Deezer Premium subscription allows you to avoid these advertisements and to choose precisely the music played, from the entire catalog. Offline mode is also part of the game: you can freely store a few albums on your phone to listen to them without interruption in the metro, the plane, or any area where the blanket Internet is lacking.
Advantages of Deezer:
- Custom radios are smart and quickly adapt to user tastes
- Deezer is available on a large number of platforms: computers, smartphones, tablets, connected televisions, Android TV box
- Elite service unlocks high definition CD audio quality
Disadvantages of Deezer:
- Some tracks are cut before the last chords
- A one-second cut is often present between two songs
- It is sometimes difficult to tell the difference between a piece of music and its different remixes (the name of the title does not display the exact version)
Spotify – The world leader in music streaming
Main competitor to Deezer, the Swedish Spotify offers an equivalent service. By registering for free, you have access to the catalog, but reading is random, zapping between tracks is limited, and advertising breaks interrupt the music.
The paid subscription is the only way to improve the listening quality (at 320 kbit/s) and to remove advertisements. It also offers offline mode and access to exclusive music content. Offers exist to adapt to the budget of families (up to 6 users) and students.
Advantages of Spotify:
- A top-notch musical catalog and an elegant dark theme
- Transfer playback between multiple devices
- A paying offer is specially dedicated to students
Cons of Spotify:
- Limiting the offline library to 10,000 titles
- No cloud integration of purchased or downloaded music
- Audio quality is limited to OGG Vorbis at 320 kbps
Google Play Music — Stream up to 50,000 songs from your personal collection
Google Play Music is the streaming music listening platform linked to the Google Play Store. It is positioned differently from the two different platforms, with regard to its free access. Each Internet user with a Google account can use the Google Play Music Manager tool to import up to 50,000 music tracks from their personal collection.
He can then play them on the go from his Google Play Music app. smart phone or his tablet. Any albums purchased individually on Google Play store will also appear in this application.
By subscribing to the paid subscription, Google Play Music gives access to a catalog of 40 million titles on demand and to Youtube Music, with the ability to zap unlimited and without advertising. Smart radios offer content that adapts to the mood or the situation, to facilitate the discovery of new things.
Benefits of Google Play Music:
- The ability to import 50,000 titles from your personal collection for free
- Unlimited and free listening to his personal collection in streaming
- Good app performance and regular updates
Cons of Google Play Music:
- An uncertain placement against YouTube Music, which could replace it in the coming years
- The application interface has not evolved and deserves an overhaul
Tidal – The High Quality Audio Streaming Platform
Tidal is a recent music streaming platform, born in 2014. Acquired by American rapper Jay-Z in 2015, it boasts a catalog of more than 60 million titles, which would make it the largest on the market. Tidal places great emphasis on music quality and streams lossless compressed audio content and some albums are even available in MASTER quality. Tidal also offers video content like clips, interviews, and concerts.
Unlike Deezer and Spotify, there is no free plan to listen to full tracks. Visitors can listen to albums and radios, but only the first 30 seconds are played. The platform offers a free trial month to its premium subscription to get an idea of the potential of Tidal.
Benefits of Tidal:
- The platform offers the best sound quality, lossless compressed
- Some artists are previewing their albums on Tidal
- The streaming service provides original and exclusive content like interviews, concerts and music videos
- The service pays artists more fairly
Cons of Tidal:
- Free access only allows you to listen to 30-second extracts
- The cost of the high quality subscription is not within everyone’s reach
What you must remember
- Deezer and Spotify are quite similar in terms of services and subscriptions. It is understandable that many users find it difficult to choose between one or the other of the two platforms. The choice for Deezer may come out of patriotism, while that for Spotify is usually a matter of preference for the dark interface.
- Google Play Music is completely different, since it allows you to create your own streaming including up to 50,000 tracks from his personal music collection. This is an option that none of the other applications presented in this article are able to offer.
- Tidal is dedicated to confirmed music lovers, who have a larger budget and equipment that can allow them to enjoy high-fidelity sound quality.
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