WHY DIDN’T I MENTION APPLE’S ICLOUD SERVICE, ITUNES MATCH, AS ONE OF THESE SOLUTIONS

In Part 1 I explained why I was ditching iTunes, laid out the top three services for streaming and why I believe these are much better for any music fanatic than iTunes.  But you may be wondering why I didn’t even mention Apple’s new iCloud music service called iTunes Match.

Apple has done a great job on marketing iTunes Match as having your entire music collection at your fingertips and not having to worry about syncing multiple devices because your music is stored in the cloud and is available on any Apple product.  Can’t argue, this is a “semi” true statement, but a little flawed once you take a look at the “at your fingertips” part.  First, the iCloud service as allowed me not to have to worry about syncing my devices every time I would purchase music, all I have to do is look in the purchased area on my iPhone and it’s all right there.  Here’s the interesting part, I have to download the music to my device, taking up storage.  So essentially, I don’t have my entire music collection at my fingertips.  I can download as many songs as I want that will fit on my 16gb iPhone.

This is where the iTunes Match service and Apple have missed the boat by a long shot and it’s why I didn’t mention it as a solution.  You cannot stream music from the iCloud as of yet.  So once you have downloaded what will fit on your device and want to listen to more from your collection, you have to delete the music that is already on the device so you can fit more onto it.  Kinda lame in my mind.  You have to keep downloading a deleting music so you can listen to all your music.

Apple has already released that by 2015 it will profit more from apps than it will in music.  So I have a feeling that eventually Apple will have to get into this game of streaming music.  And not just streaming your own purchased music, I think they will have to have a separate service like Rhapsody, where users can opt into a monthly fee to stream music from iTunes like cloud.

Even if they came out with an iTunes Match streaming service of your own collection, I still would stick to Rhapsody because there is still the issue of purchasing the music to listen to and with Rhapsody a small monthly fee gets you a ton more music to stream or download.

Talk soon,

P.S. Rhapsody just hit me up with a 30 day free trail to all my music fanatic friends out there who want to try it out.  The normal free trial is only 14 days if you visit their website directly, so this is an added bonus for 16 days if you hit the link below.

Try Rhapsody for a 30 day Free trial

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I CAN’T BELIEVE I’M SAYING THIS, BUT THERE IS A FAR BETTER MUSIC SERVICE THAN ITUNES

As an avid Apple product fan and music lover, I can’t even believe it myself saying that I have found a much better music service than iTunes, but I have and I’ll let you in on what it is and explain how music lovers can benefit.

For the longest time I couldn’t pry myself away from iTunes and my iPod.  I always wanted to own my own music so I could do with it as I please.  If someone wanted a copy of what I had in my collection of tunes, I could share it with them.  I also wanted my entire music collection on a single device and take it wherever I would go.

But there was one big issue I could never get over, I had to pay for each song or album.  Now if you are someone that may hear a song on the radio every so often and what a copy, money isn’t an issue.  Pay the $.99 and your done.  But if you’re like me and have a ton of music you want to purchase, this starts chipping away at your bank account fast.  So needless to say I am WAY behind on my music collection due to the costs.  What’s the solution? Well, it’s hard for me to say, but renting some one’s entire music collection for a monthly cost.

I think we are starting to get into the era of streaming music from our mobile devices and the old hard drive music players are on their way out.  Even Apple’s biggest iPod, the iPod classic, is starting to see big decreases in sales and I think they will start looking at discontinuing them.

Here’s my thinking behind this whole renting thing.  Let’s say you just purchase one album at $9.99 a month, what do you get….one album.  Sure it’s yours, but in my years of owning my music I’ve only burned a couple of albums for others to listen too.  So, if you’re like me, I could spend about $25 or more a month just getting caught up on old music I want and also new releases.  And, I would be paying for music the rest of my life.  That’s going to leave a mark for sure.

So, I changed my thinking.  I could rent a music collection of 13 million plus songs and have all of my music on one device just as I wanted for $9.99 a month.  And the best part is, they keep adding music to their collections weekly.  Honestly this seems like a no brainer and should have thought of this a long time ago.

So let’s take a look at the top three music collections for streaming music on the iPhone and what I found.

I checked this one out because it just came out in the U.S. and people were raving all over social media about it.  I took it for a free trial spin and only after about two days cancelled this one.  Their music collection is only about 11 million right now.  I checked out one of my favorite country music artists that has been out since 1993 and they only had one of their albums.  Moving on……..I checked out more of my favorites and found a lot of albums missing.  Sure their collection will grow with time, but does me no good right now.  So as far as I’m concerned, Spotify just ain’t all that.

This service I had read about searching Google for the top music streaming services.  I went ahead a got on board for the free trial.  I have to admit this seemed like the one.  I really like their iPhone app, simple and easy to use.  You could add any song or album to your favorites and listen to them whenever you wanted.  The streaming part was great, no hiccups and sounded great.  It also has a feature that allows a play queue, so it was really like a on the go play list, which you could clear out at any time.  Also, it has a feature that when you play a song, it lists other songs in that genre that might appeal to you.  Pretty cool for finding new music, but only suggests up to about five or six songs.  One downside, which didn’t really matter to me, but may for you is that you cannot create play lists from the iPhone app.  You have to create play lists on your computer that automatically syncs to the iPhone app.  There music collection is quite impressive too, although it is missing some of my favorites.

I really had forgot about this little gem, until a friend of mine reminded me of it.  I had read some reviews about their iPhone app and weren’t that great.  Reviews were saying that it crashes a lot which is not good if your streaming music and can be a huge issue, one that could stray customers away.  So I dug a little deeper and found that their music collection was even a bit better than MOG.  So I had to try it to see what their iPhone app features were and if the reviews were true.  I have found that it will sometimes crash, but nothing significant and doesn’t get annoying.  The one thing I found that MOG is better than Rhapsody is when you are looking at an artists album within Rhapsody, some of the songs are greyed out and you can’t play them.  This is because you can’t stream or play them unless you purchase them.  This could be a problem if there was a certain song you wanted off the album.  It’s not often and I haven’t came across a “had to have song” that was greyed out.  Their iPhone app is pretty slick and has a lot of features that MOG doesn’t.  You can create a play list right from within the app.  Another feature I use often to find new music is a feature called related artist.  Once you click on a singer you can go to the related artist tab to find additional related music.  Very cool.

These three services are a like in many ways and it really depends on ones own preferences. So as you may tell, after trying all three I went with Rhapsody for the $9.99 per month option.  This allows for you to use it on your computer and up to one mobile device.  You can opt for the $14.99 per month and it allows you to use it on up to three mobile devices.  The only problem is you can’t stream music at the same time on all three devices.  So don’t think you can load it on to your spouses or friends device and all enjoy streaming music, won’t work.

The biggest limitation you will have for streaming music is your data plan.  If you have an unlimited plan you should be ok.  Although this may put you into a pinch because cell phone companies are now throttling unlimited data plans.  This means if you are within the top 5% of their data users per month and you hit a certain usage ceiling, they will slow your speed down to a crawl after hitting that mark for the month.  After that month is up, you get your top speed back until you hit the ceiling again and so on.  The only good part is, if there can be in this situation, is the company should let you know if you are getting into that 5% and you are getting close to having your speed downgraded for that month.  I have an unlimited data plan and use my iPhone for simple things like browsing the internet and email.  I also steam music for about 4-6 hours per day and have never received this type of notification from my cell phone company.  I have checked and as of January 24, 2011 I have used 2.7gb of data on my unlimited plan and my billing cycle doesn’t end until February 11, 2011.  So we will see if I get a notification and what this ceiling may be.

If you do have a limited data plan, streaming music may not be an option for you and you would have to download your songs to your device for listening.  Each one of these three services allows for unlimited downloads so that won’t be an issue, except for your a limited to the data storage on you device.  Below I have included a chart so you can see how much data you will use if you stream music.

Here’s how many hours of music streaming you can do on a 2GB data plan.

96kbps (Radio Quality) — 45.76 hours of streaming per month

160kbps (3G Quality) — 27.52 hours of streaming per month

320kbps (CD Quality) — 13.79 hours of streaming per month

I believe all three services are the same.  If your streaming on your 3G data plan it plays at 160kbps.  If your are streaming on a WiFi network, it would be at the 320kbps.  But on a WiFi network you shouldn’t be using any of your data plan, so this should only come into play while using your 3G data plan.  Keep in mind this is just streaming music and doesn’t include data for anything else you may use it for.

As a side note.  Streaming music does eat up battery life, so have some type of charging device handy.  Although I have noticed it doesn’t drain it as quick as when I listen to the radio using TuneIn Radio.

What’s your thoughts?  Is there any top notch service I have left out?  Leave a comment and let me know your experience or opinions.

Talk soon,

UPDATE:  It looks like data throttling is set to around 5gb per month on an unlimited plan.  Although looking at some of the tech blogs, once you reach this limit still doesn’t mean that you will start seeing a drop in network speed.  The company states that throttling is based on a case by case scenario built around many factors.  See the pictures below, I reached the 5gb mark and received the text from hell stating I was now in the top 5% of users and had to use wifi to avoid reduced network speeds.  The day the text came in was the last day of my billing cycle, but I did test the speed and my iPhone was still seeing some highend speeds on 3G.

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THE IPHONE IS NOT THE COOLEST SMARTPHONE TO OWN THESE DAYS…..THE THREE BIGGEST NAMES IN SMARTPHONES BATTLE IT OUT TO WIN POPULARITY CONTEST

It looks like the iPhone is falling short in the popularity contest with the kids and college crowd.  And the reason is “because my dad has an iPhone.”  Guess the kindergarten attitude is coming out a little in the gadget world.  It looks like what’s being carried around one major campus is HTC and Samsung devices, not the iPhone according to the Boy Genius Report.

This is interesting because HTC and Samsung have been hitting the market hard in the last year or so with new devices every couple of months it seems.  And Apple continues to only release one upgraded iPhone per year.  They each started out doing the same thing Apple did with the iPhone, release one great smartphone, and then follow it up within a year.  But it seemed HTC and Samsung weren’t gaining ground with the iPhone.  So they switched the game up a little to see what they could do to get get a piece of the pie.

Let’s face it, Americans want the latest and greatest of whatever product is out there.  And smartphones are falling into the same category very quickly with HTC and Samsung figuring this out, Apple not so much.  The iPhone was the best and coolest device to have for a long while when smartphones started becoming the thing to have.  So as usual, other companies wanted in on the action so the battle starts.  The only two major players that have risen to the top are HTC and Samsung.  But they noticed that by following Apple’s lead, they would never catch up because everyone just waited until the next iPhone.

What HTC and Samsung have figured out is that since smartphones are in almost everybody’s pocket now days, every two or three months millions of subscribers were due for an upgrade.  And guess what, Apple couldn’t deliver on all these upgrades and the American desire to have the latest and greatest cool gadget, so these two giants are now able to quinch peoples thirst by having a new device ready and waiting.

Does Apple really care?  I don’t think so and never will.  Steve Jobs didn’t build it this way.  I don’t think his company would be where it is today if he came out with a new iPhone, Macbook, iMac or any one of their products every couple of months to satisfy this desire.  He wanted his company to stand out and this is exactly what it is today.  I put Apple in the same category as Bose.  Bose is the premiere company that gives its customers the best quality sound in many different formats.  Yes they both produce products that follow where the market is going, which is what all companies do, but Apple and Bose look at the way they do it in a very unique light.

So what do you think about all this “hip to be square” stuff?  Which device are you using right now and why?

Talk soon,

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