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The digital era has made us witnesses to a real revolution in the way we consume music.
Do you remember Emule, Napster or Ares? And before that: do you remember the cassette tapes? Maybe you don’t because you're younger, but oh, good old times, that gesture of rewinding songs with a pen!
With the arrival of the Internet we have gone from accumulating huge towers of vinyl, cassettes or CDs to housing our music libraries as data on our hard drives, to making them immaterial and leaving them in the cloud with streaming music platforms, our latest technological conquest.
What are streaming music platforms?
Streaming music platforms are basically those that allow you to play audio or video continuously, without having to download the files and some even without being connected to the internet.
There are paid platforms, some free based on advertising, but all of them with similar characteristics: they allow you to play on any of your devices, integrate with other systems, create your own libraries and discover all the novelties thanks to their algorithms, which learn from your habits.
They literally allow you to take all your music with you at all times. Go play the perfect soundtrack at any time in your life, I bring you the list of the best streaming music platforms
Best Music Streaming Platforms
Go play the perfect soundtrack at any time in your life, I bring you the list of the best streaming music platforms
When it comes to this platforms, Spotify is possibly the best known, with 30 million songs and 75 million subscribers, which amounts to a staggering 271 million if you count the active users who do not pay a fee.
It is a free desktop platform with App and maintained with ads. To get rid of the ads and have all the playback options and the best quality at your fingertips, you have to become Premium through a subscription.
Its interface is extremely easy to use and is integrated with third parties (Amazon Alexa and Google Chromecast). It has a large variety of different and very well selected playlists, offering you services such as the Weekly Discovery, the New Music Friday or the Scanner FM lists, all elaborated from the analysis of your listening habits.
Included with your Amazon Prime subscription, it gives you over 50 million tracks and integrates seamlessly with the entire Amazon Fire and Echo family of devices, so you can use Alexa, her talent and experience to discover new music. In terms of quality, it's similar to Tidal if you subscribe to their Amazon Music Unlimited service.
It contains 59 million songs, 150,000 video clips and 4 million users, and its Hi-Fi service offers 24-bit audio resolution, which at the moment is the maximum we can get.
It has contracts with the most renowned record labels and was re-launched in 2014 under the name of Jay Z to become the first continuous broadcast service controlled by the artists themselves.
Since 2016 it has been integrated with its sister service, WiMP, and has recently been offered with some Vodafone packages in an attempt to challenge the hegemony of Spotify.
Tidal is ideal for use when connected to high quality equipment and is designed for a profile of users who are primarily concerned with the fidelity of their audio source.
It's available for Android and PC, but it's definitely the best option for Apple fans because it obviously integrates with all Apple iPhone, iPad and MacBook devices offering, with Airplay 2 and HomePod, a similar experience as with Amazon Echo and Google's Chromecast products.
Apple Music is paid and has an extensive catalogue that is always updated, with 60 million songs. On its own radio, which broadcasts live 24 hours a day, you can listen to interviews with many well-known artists and participate in exclusive premieres. Radio Beats 1 is presented by famous DJs like Zane Lowe and celebrities like Ryan Adams, Pharrell Williams or Mike D, among others.
It works as a social network for music creators, with almost 200 million active users uploading their own music. Its algorithms generate your custom lists through the "radio channels" feature. It's the best choice for news crawlers because it uncovers the best independent music for you.
With Soundcloud you'll meet your next favorite artist before he becomes famous. Includes advertising that can be cancelled by paying a monthly subscription.
He is the younger brother of Soundcloud, and it’s the one for podcasting and radio streaming. But what really makes it special is that it's the DJ's favourite.
As a social network, you will be able to download music and share your creations. It offers several music players to be embedded in your web, and everything for free!
In Mixcloud you’ll find your favourite DJ offering weekly sessions to get you on fire when you need it the most.
Although it's not as well known as Spotify because it hasn’t really take off in the US, the truth is that Deezer has almost the same turnover and over 53 million songs and 16 million users.
It’s a French platform based on advertising available in 182 countries and 16 languages. It has several types of subscriptions that allow you to skip the advertising and has generated a community around it, becoming also a social network where the authors themselves can share, upload and download their own music.It’s a bit like Soundcloud, but t offers more tools to measure your reach.
It includes podcasts, live radio stations and the Deezer Sessions, where you can listen to sessions recorded by artists such as Jade Bird, Dua Lipa or The Streets.
With the Flow feature, Deezer will learn from your taste and offer you a shuffle mode based on tracks similar to the music you usually listen to.
It’s formed by a community of 6 million subscribers and offers about 50 million songs. It has been integrated into the video platform as an extra, to try to change the habits of consumers of music videos. It has the advantage of being 100% integrated with all Google services. It also offers the 'radio mode' that allows Google users to store 50,000 songs in a particular cloud to generate custom-made playlists.
It already has 40 million songs and 6 million users.
Google Play Music is not strictly a streaming site, but the service of storing up to 50,000 songs in the cloud. It's synchronized with the Google Play online store, so you consume the songs you pay for and take them with you anywhere. Most likely, this service will soon merge somehow with Youtube Music, to give a cleaner and easier user experience.
It’s an application available for Android and iOS and has been running for many years.
It allows you to create your own library, fully customized, discover the trends of the moment, share your tastes and join a lot of different radios.
You can use the application for free, although its paid version has some advantages, such as no ads. It is one of the longest lasting in this sector and we are very fond of it.
We all know that Spotify continues to conquer the streaming music market, but competition is still increasing, so all other platforms are constantly trying to outdo it and, fortunately for us, they are offering more and more advantages to attract music consumers, which to a greater or lesser extent is all of us.
The decision is now yours. Take advantage of all the options they offer. You can subscribe to several services at once. If none of them win you over, you can always go back to your old Walkman.
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