Music streaming apps are second only to social media apps in popularity, and there are thousands to choose from in both the iOS and Android stores. There are radio station apps, DJ events, live videos, apps that let you stream your favorite artists and music, so many to choose from. Spotify is one of the most popular apps on the market, but its subscription cost is prohibitive to many, and the free version is simply too limited. And not everyone feels that it offers the best value for money.
So, how do you choose an alternative app that suits you? You could download them all and try them but, something we are all guilty of, we often don’t delete apps when we no longer want them, and it’s easy to clog up your tablet or smartphone memory. Instead, we found a few alternatives to Spotify for you.
Best Spotify Alternatives:
We did the homework and tested several different music streaming apps and, although some of them are the same subscription price as Spotify, we felt that they offered far more value for money.
SoundCloud
SoundCloud was originally a web app but has now extended to a mobile app that offers a huge and diverse choice of bands, musicians, podcasters, and more. It has an easy to use interface, exactly the same style and features of the web app; it has the search facility to let you find tracks or podcasts, stream music, and upload or store your own music in the app too. It is free to use, but there is an option to subscribe to SoundCloud Go at the cost of $5.99 per month with a 7-day free trial, or SoundCloud Go+ at $12.99 per month with a 30-day free trial. Available for download from TweakBox app https://tweak-box.com .
Google Play Music
Google Play Music is soon to be integrated with YouTube Music, so you might wonder why we bothered including this one. Well, for the time being, it is still a standalone app, and all users are assured that, when the transition does happen, their playlists will be transferred as they are. Right now, Google Play Music offers great access to all their cloud, and website music can podcasts. It has a great user interface, is simple to use and, when you pay a monthly subscription of $10, you get access to a huge collection of music, a great choice of radio stations, unlimited skips, and YouTube Red so that you can have your music playing in the background. The ads present on the free version disappear, you get an offline mode, and you can upload your own tunes and podcasts to the cloud.
Amazon Music
Amazon is one of the latecomers to the music streaming market, but it doesn’t lack in what it offers. There is a free version, but it is very limited in what it offers. It requires a paid subscription of $10 per month to the Amazon Music Unlimited services to get access to the entire cloud library. However, if you take out an Amazon Prime subscription at $8 per month, you also get access to Music Unlimited as well as a whole host of other features. And Prime members also get the option of a limited free version of the full memberships with access to 2 million tracks. That’s a pretty great offer from Amazon.
Pandora
Pandora is another app taking the mainstream music streaming market by storm, mainly because it is something different. It is a radio station app, offering a huge choice of premade radio stations and the option to build your own based on your favorite songs and/or artists. You can have up to 100 stations on the free app and more on the paid subscriptions, of which there are two – Pandora Premium at $4.99 per month and Pandora Plus at $12.99 per month, both of which offer free trial periods. With those, you get an ad-free experience, offline mode, unlimited skips, and a better quality of audio.
iHeartRadio
Another radio station app, iHeartRadio, offers live streaming of AM/FM radio stations covering pretty much any genre you can think of as well as news. It has a simple interface making it dead simple to find what you want, and you get the option of making up a list of custom stations. There are over 450,000 artists to choose from, and you can also upgrade to a paid subscription at $5 per month – with this, you can save tracks to favorites, skip or replay tracks and personalize your choices to suit you.
Five music streaming apps, each one was offering something very different. Music streaming is so popular these days, especially among the younger generation, and these apps offer a choice of free or paid services.
Try them, see what offers your favorite music and the features that suit your requirements.
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