Apple Music and Spotify's paid tier fall into this category. Until recently, so did Amazon Music, which you did not have to pay extra for. It was a benefit of Amazon Prime.
The second type of streaming music service is usually free and has restrictions. You can't download anything, for example. Maybe you can create playlists, but when you listen to them, they play on shuffle. This type of music service is mostly for people who just want to have music they like playing in the background, but who don't care what music is playing.
Some free services don't even allow you to choose the song you want to listen to. You can tell it what song you want, and it will pick other songs that are like the one you want, and play those. At some point, the algorithm will probably surface the song you asked for, but the reason the service is free is that music contracts are weird and they make it so that it's expensive to let users pick the song they want to listen to.
Amazon Music used to be sort of the best of both. It was free, but gave you access to a modestly-sized catalogue with all the benefits usually reserved for paid services. Now, that has all changed. It's still free, but now you can only play songs on shuffle.
No comments:
Post a Comment