Since the early years of the Internet, music station have been around. They were originally called Internet Radio, but since the hard core users of the Internet were very low, these stations were left alone by the RIAA and other copyright institutions. Now that anyone can get access to pretty much everything faster and easier before, the Internet Radio for mainstream music has been quashed and replaced by Online Music Services. Most of these services act more like terrestrial over the air radio stations, playing songs you have no control over and having commercial ads inserted throughout. Unless you pay a premium to get rid of the ads, but the control of the music you hear is still limited.
Currently I use several different online music services for different reasons through different devices. Right now I have no plans to pay for any of them. I use 3 major music services on a regular basis and have tried out several others. Now these services I use are not for playing my music that I own, these are for online music only. They are iTunes, Pandora, and Spotify.
When it comes down to it, I don't have the time to invest hours and hours into music that I used to, my duration of music listening is very small, and the value received from a paid subscription over what you get for free is not there.
iTunes - Not including my personal collection, I use iTunes for podcast subscriptions and I am starting to listen to the radio in iTunes. I usually listen to iTunes on my PC which is usually pumped to my home stereo via an Airport Express. Occasionally I will listen to podcasts at work but I cannot get the 1 hour of steady listening most of the podcasts I subscribe to are.
Pandora - I use Pandora mainly while I am driving and more frequently at work from my iPad. The free version is just fine for my use, I never go over 40 hours of listening in a month, I have enough channels to get around the song skipping limitation and the ads are not annoying. The paid version of unlimited skipping and listening time ad-free is not enough to get me to pay. I rarely, if at all anymore, listen to Pandora on my desktop.
Spotify - I listen to Spotify 100% on my home PC when I am working. The great thing about Spotify is that you can pretty much get any song and album you want at no charge. The free version is scattered with ads but if you are a regular radio listener you get used to it quickly. Very early on when Spotify became available in the United States I was very close to writing it off for good as a real pain in the butt to use because you have to setup your own play lists. Then I found Share My Playlists, a website solely for people to share Spotify playlists. Then Spotify got real sweet to use to find really out of band music.
The others that I have played around with are iHeartRadio and Last.FM, but they didn't pan out to meet my use or provide any additional features to get me to move.
Right now as it sits, ad supported music services are just fine with me. My personal use patterns and the annoyances from the ads aren't enough motivation to get me to shell out a fee. The music selections are excellent and I am not disappointed with the quality of playback either. It is what it is and I am cool with it.
However, if I were to jump in and pay for an online service it would be Spotify and it would be the top tier service to maximum mobile access. But I am not quite there yet... I wish I could get a straight, uninterrupted hour to listen to music at all.
End of line.
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