Top 5 big and popular Streaming Music Services

Music is so important to us. When you are happy, you like some happy music. When you are sad, you will also need some music.

Where to listen to the music, the streaming Music services will be a good choice.

Here collect the top 5 big and popular streaming music services, and you will find one you like. 

Spotify

Spotify is slowly but surely becoming the most popular subscription-based music streaming service worldwide that offers users unlimited access and streaming limits to an extremely wide variety of audio tracks, artists, genres, albums and playlists. With a free account, you can play any artist, album or playlist on shuffle for free.

Referral reading: Spotify VS Apple Music

All you need to do is sign up and start using it from the web, desktop application or mobile apps. You can use Spotify freely for however long you want, but if you want to listen to specific tracks any time or build more complex playlists for yourself, you'll need to upgrade to a premium account.

Google Play Music

Google Play Music offers more music than you'd ever imagine in any genre that you want and by practically any artist or band that has ever existed. There are also tons of pre-built playlists that are suggested to you based on the date and time, taking into account activities you might be doing or holidays that are coming up. You can even upload and sync up to 50,000 tracks from your own music collection.

The one major downside is that Google Play Music is loaded with ads. As long as you stick with the free version, be prepared to sit through lots of long commercials between songs.

Pandora

Pandora is “free personalized radio that only plays music you’ll love,” and at the moment it's only available for listeners in the U.S., Australia and New Zealand. The Pandora "Music Genome Project" involved analyzing over 450 qualities of individual songs to produce an advanced algorithm that seeks to help users discover the music that fits their styles and tastes as accurately as possible.

You can create up to 100 unique stations and tweak them as you listen. There’s also an upgrade you can make, called Pandora One, which takes away the ads, offers higher listening quality, adds desktop applications, provides different custom skin choices and minimizes interruptions while you’re enjoying music.

Apple Music

Apple Music is a full-fledged subscription streaming music service that compares favorably with other top cloud music services such as Spotify, Pandora Radio, etc. It has excellent mobile support and also has good music discovery options.

Referral reading: Pros and Cons of Apple Music, VS iTunes Match

Rather than relying solely on algorithms to suggest new music, the service also extensively uses expert-curated playlists to serve up suggestions.

Amazon Music Unlimited

Amazon Music Unlimited is a premium music subscription service featuring tens of millions of songs and thousands of expert-programmed playlists and stations. With Amazon Music Unlimited, you can listen to any song, anytime, anywhere, on all your devices – smartphone, tablet, PC/Mac, Fire TV, and Alexa-enabled devices like Amazon Echo.

Tens of millions of songs with new releases from today's most popular artists. Listen ad-free with unlimited skips. Download for offline listening.

Some sources from https://www.lifewire.com/best-online-music-services-for-streaming-songs-2438823

As a Music Artist, how to choose among Pandora Vs. Spotify Vs. Apple Music Vs. Soundcloud

Pandora Vs. Spotify Vs. Apple Music Vs. Soundcloud: Which Is Better For The Artist?

If you are one Artist, how to choose among Pandora Vs. Spotify Vs. Apple Music Vs. Soundcloud

Pandora Media Inc has rolled out is new Artist Marketing Platform (AMP), which features a number of marketing tools that artists can use to promote their music.

Streaming music services have gotten a lot of criticism lately for how little they pay artists for their music. Taylor Swift has been one of the most recognizable and vocal artists speaking out against how streaming services like Spotify treat musical artists.

Pandora’s new AMP is the company’s latest effort to reach out to those artists that provide the content that their business is based on. Here’s a look at what each of the major streaming services offer artists in terms of pay, perks and marketing services.

Pandora

Pandora’s new AMP includes several artist-friendly features. Artist Audio Messages allow artists to record short, targeted spoken messages to play before or after their tracks to help with marketing. Featured Tracks allows artists to promote single tracks and receive real-time feedback from listeners. Ticketfly Integration allows artists to customize their audio messages, integrate concert ticket sales (including a “click to buy” ticket link), and optimize promotions for specific events and locations.

Back in February, federal judges ruled that Pandora must pay artists a blended advertising/subscription rate of $0.0017 per stream.

Spotify

According to Spotify Artists’ website, Spotify also has several useful features for artists. Spotify automatically sends out email and mobile notifications to followers every time an artist releases new music. Songkick integration allows artists to display tour dates directly on their profile. Merchbar also allows artists to easily list and sell merchandise.

In addition, Spotify offers artists a wide range of other data and marketing tools.

As of about a year ago, Spotify was reportedly paying artists $0.0011 per stream.

Apple Music

Apple Music for Artists allows artists to share content and activity on Connect. Artists can post links and thoughts on their Connect feed. Apple Inc. reportedly pays artists $0.0013 per streaming play.

Related Link: Apple Music vs iTunes Match, Apple Music to MP3

SoundCloud

SoundCloud Spotlight allows artists to pin up to five tracks or playlists to their profile to showcase their best work. Timed comments allows artists to engage with their fans about individual tracks. Artists can edit in batch by simultaneously updating artwork for many tracks at once. Artists can also tag their music to optimize search traffic.

In addition, artists can track activity over time and identify top cities, countries and users for each track. Artists also get to see which websites have embedded their music and which SoundCloud apps their tracks are being streamed from.

SoundCloud currently offers four distinct membership tiers for artists. The features mentioned above are available at the Pro Unlimited tier, which costs $15 per month. The top tier, Premier, is by invitation only. Premier is the level at which artists can begin making money for their tracks via advertising revenue sharing, but there is no set rate of payment for each streaming play.

Summary

This summary is just a basic overview of some of the options that are out there for music artists. The best option comes down to which goals are most important for each individual artist. However, it's important to keep expectations for streaming revenue fairly low unless you’re already a well-established star.
One band that drew more than a million streams on Spotify back in 2013 reported only $4,955 in total revenue. Even that rate comes in at $0.004891/stream, well above the latest reported rates of the major streaming services.

Source from https://www.benzinga.com/general/education/16/10/8569020/pandora-vs-spotify-vs-apple-music-vs-soundcloud-which-is-better-for-

How to choose one music subscription for you among Apple Music, Spotify, Pandora Radio and Rdio

Apple Music VS Spotify VS Pandora Vs Rdio

Wiki of Apple Music, Spotify , Pandora and Rdio

Apple Music is a music streaming service by Apple Inc. Users select music to stream to their device on demand. The service includes the curated Internet radio station Beats 1 and the blog platform Connect for artists to share media with fans. 

Spotify is a Swedish commercial music streaming, podcast and video service that provides digital rights management-restricted content from record labels and media companies including BBC, Sony, EMI, Warner Music Group, and Universal. Music can be browsed or searched by artist, album, genre, playlist, or record label.

Pandora Internet Radio (also known as Pandora Radio or simply Pandora) is a music streaming and automated music recommendation service powered by the Music Genome Project. 

Rdio is an online music service that offers ad-supported free streaming and ad-free subscription streaming services in 85 countries.

How much do you need to cost for the service?

Apple Music: the $9.99-per-month Apple Music boasts more than 30 million tracks, and $14.99 family plan.

Spotify: There is free version to use, and also $9.99 per month for the ad-free Premium service including 30 million songs.

Pandora Radio: it provides with the free service, users only get six skips an hour or 24 fast-forwards per day. And also Pandora One, the company’s $4.99 per month subscription.

Rido: It offers free and paid plan ($3.99 per month Rdio Select and $9.99 per month, Rdio Unlimited ) to choose, including the same 30 million-sized library as Spotify and Apple Music.

Where you can play and install

Apple Music is compatible with iOS devices running version 8.4 or later, iTunes version 12.2 or later (OS X Mavericks or later; Windows 7 or later), and the Apple Watch. It will also receive a release for Android devices and Apple TV in fall 2015.

Spotify is available for Android, BlackBerry, Boxee, iOS, Linux, MeeGo, Microsoft Windows desktop, Openpandora, OS X, Roku, S60 (Symbian), Samsung Smart TV, Sonos, HEOS by Denon,[16][17] PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Squeezebox, Telia Digital-tv, TiVo, WD TV, webOS, Windows Mobile, and Windows Phone; it is not available as a Windows Store app for Windows 8, though a third-party client, Spotlite, exists.

Pandora is available on the iPhone and on Google Android OS (for tablets and mobile phones). Pandora can be played on home CE devices such as WD TV, Roku, Google TV, Xbox One, audio-video receivers, and Blu-ray players. Many HDTVs can also stream Pandora. Pandora can be played in some vehicles.

Rdio: It is available as a website and also has applications for iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone mobile devices, which can stream music from its servers or download music for offline playback. There are also clients for the Roku and Sonos systems. The web-based service also offers a native desktop client application for Mac OS X and Windows, as well as a Windows Store application.

How about the sound quality.

Apple Music

Apple Music is streamed at 256Kbps in AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) format.

Spotify

Spotify offers two music streaming tiers: Spotify Free (160kbps) and Spotify Premium (up to 320kbps). Both tiers are lossy quality better than Apple Music.

Pandora

On the Web Pandora delivers 64kbit/s AAC+ for free listeners and 192kbit/s for Pandora One subscribers. On in-home devices Pandora plays 128kbit/s audio, whereas mobile devices receive different rates depending on the device and network capabilities, but "never more than 64kbps AAC+".[21] Pandora does not offer digital music streaming in CD quality (e.g. FLAC 16-Bit/44.1 kHz).

Rdio:

All Rdio users can choose between data-efficient 64 kbps all the way up to 192 kbps. Rdio will now be offering that 320 Kbps quality AAC files to those who subscribe to its $10 monthly premium service.

How many files you can listen to?

Apple Music: more than 30 million tracks

Spotify: including 30 million songs.

Pandora: currently more than 1.5 million audio tracks.

Rdio: Over 30 million songs to high-quality AAC audio.

Including Radio or not:

Apple Music: Yes

Spotify: Yes

Pandora: Yes

Rdio: No

How many countries it supports?

Apple Music: 110

Spotify: Almost 100

Pandora: 3. (To comply with the requirements and protections offered by the DMCA, Pandora only serves users in the United States, New Zealand and Australia.)

Rdio: 85

Special Features:

Apple Music:

Provide music recommendations based on user taste and is integrated with Siri voice commands.

Spotify:

Create playlists and follow fellow music lovers.

Pandora

Discover new artists and new songs.

Rdio:

Online interface, making database searching and playlist curation easy

From all the comparison, you can choose one music subscription as you like. If you want to convert Apple Music or backup your iTunes Music, you can try the iTunes Music Converter

http://www.macsome.com/itunes-converter-mac/apple-music-converter.html .

Have a nice time!

Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Music

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora_Radio

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rdio