Google announced the Google Music Beta service during its recent I/O conference. Essentially, Google Music Beta will allow you to upload 20,000 of your songs to a virtual "locker," which you can access anywhere via the web or your Android device. Google Music Beta is already available to early testers who managed to score a beta invite (you can request a beta invite from Google if you want to check it out).
In addition to accessing your music, the service will carry your playlists and preferences everywhere you use it. The app caches your recently played music, so you can still access it without an internet connection, providing you at least some music if you happen to be offline.
While Google Music Beta is pretty exciting news, the cloud-based storage method won't necessarily appeal to everyone. Other options and competing services already exist across the internet, and you can use them now even without an invitation.
1. Amazon Cloud Player
The Amazon Cloud Player is the most direct competitor to Google Music Beta. The Amazon offering allows you to upload any kind of document to its Cloud Drive, providing a specific Cloud Player to let you listen to your music. Using the same storage space for both music and other types of files is obviously a pretty big benefit. On the drawbacks side, though, Amazon charges if your storage locker goes over 5GB, at a rate of about $1 per GB. The Amazon Cloud Drive has received pretty good reviews so far, although there's a bit of legal uproar because Amazon didn't secure licensing ahead of time.
2. Slacker Premium Radio
Slacker Premium Radio is a different approach to letting you stream music. With Google Music Beta and Amazon Cloud Drive, you're streaming your own music to your device; you've already purchased this music by other means. With Slacker Premium Radio, you're listening to Slacker's music collection, which might not have every song or artist you're after. The paid premium service is on-demand radio, letting you pick and choose your music.
The drawback to Slacker is that while you're only paying about $10 a month to listen to music, you still don't actually own it at all. Since you don't have a local copy of the tunes anywhere, you can't enjoy it without access to the internet.
3. Pandora
Pandora has been around for quite a few years, and it's still the standard for internet streaming music. Pandora is an internet radio site that builds its music "channels" from your musical preferences. You can skip music you don't want to listen to, although you can only skip so many songs at a time. You can create your own music channels, of course, usually based off favorite artists. You can even mix up your music channels and let Pandora surprise you with its own music selections. As you come across songs that you particularly like or dislike, rate them to help Pandora further refine your preferences.
4. Last.fm
Last.fm is fundamentally the same idea as Pandora; it's an internet radio station that bases its music selection on your preferences. It uses an app called the Scrobbler, which you download to your computer. The Scrobbler looks at the music you already own to figure out your music preferences and also tracks what you like and listen to for your own reference. Then, as you listen to music on Last.fm, the station pays attention to your music choices to further refine the songs you hear. You're not required to use the Scrobbler to get started, but it certainly makes setting up your account faster.
What separates Last.fm from Google Music Beta and even Pandora is that you can use the service to find local events. This is nice feature that lets you find nearby concerts that might be of interest.
5. Grooveshark
Grooveshark lets you upload music to the service and then share it with other people. At the same time, you can search other folks' uploads and check out their music. It is, simply put, a huge on-demand music sharing service. It's almost a little surprising that it's lasted this long, since this seems like the kind of model the music industry would attack with guns blazing. All you need to set up your Grooveshark service is an email address. It offers a premium service, which allows you to access music without any pesky advertisements.
Grooveshark shares the same drawback as Last.fm and Pandora; since it's solely a streaming music service, you can't listen to anything if you don't have an internet connection.
6. YouTube
Folks usually don't think of YouTube as a streaming music service, but the reality is that many artists keep official music videos online with the service. Much to many music labels' chagrin, fans keep even more unofficial songs on YouTube.
If you take some time plugging through searches to finding music and videos that appeal to you, it's easy to build playlists of your favorite videos that serve as a "music video station." Your listening experience will occasionally be interrupted by advertisements, but that's common on streaming services nowadays.
Google Music Beta is pretty exciting; folks are lined up to get an invitation and try out the service. But there are already many streaming music options out there, including some ways to build your own, very specialized playlists. While there's a lot of buzz about the new entry into the streaming music arena, don't forget that there are already some great services operating right now.
Post by Michael Gray
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