Music apps bring goodness to the ears

“Things used to be a whole lot simpler.”

It’s easy to feel that way sometimes, especially when it comes to advances in technology. Everything is changing – some things for the better, and some…well, not so much. Music is a great example. Get a group of people together from different generations and there is no doubt that music has changed. The instrumentation, the tempo, the content and context – even the way we acquire and listen to music has changed.

In my lifetime I’ve seen LPs, 45s, 8-tracks, cassette tapes, compact discs, mini-discs (oh yeah, you missed those, didn’t you), boom boxes, Walkmans, MP3 players, iPods, satellite radio and digital streaming. Those of you old enough to remember all these things know we’ve come a long way.

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This really hit me hard the other day. I was driving in my car, listening to the ‘80s station on satellite radio. A song came on that I hadn’t heard probably since its original radio debut 25 years ago. I glanced down at the display and got the name of the song, the artist and the year it was released. I made a mental note that I would look up this song on Spotify when I got home and add it to my “Awesome Hits of the ‘80s” playlist – reserved for only the most stellar songs from that diverse decade. My, how things have changed.

I remember when, if you heard a song that you liked on the radio, you hoped Apollo (the Greek God of music) would look down on you with favor and cause the deejay to break in and give you some scrap of information about that song that would allow you to purchase it the next time you were in the record store. Otherwise you were left trying to burn the chorus into your mind so that you could hum a few bars for your friends, clinging desperately to the hope that they had heard the same song too.

Radio information displays and Internet searching have remedied this problem to a degree, but there are still times when you hear a catchy tune but have no way of ascertaining the name and/or any information about it. Enter a handy little app called Shazam — not related to Captain Marvel circa the ‘70s.

Available on a multitude of devices, Shazam will listen to music coming from your device, your radio, your TV, and sometimes even your mouth and then return to you — quite quickly — the name of the song and artist. Armed with that information, the app allows you to purchase, share, research and find related music.

With song identification easily handled, procurement is the next step – or is it?

Unless you are a collector of vinyl or are just looking to reminisce, you probably are never going to find yourself inside, let alone near, a record store again. They’re gone. Kaput. In fact, purchasing music from something as relatively new as Apple’s iTunes Store even seems archaic. Seriously, who buys their music by song or album anymore? Streaming music is the name of the game now.

Google announced earlier this month that it was unveiling a streaming music service that will dovetail into its recently released “Play” cloud storage.

Play allows you to upload music you already own to Google’s servers and then play that music through your computer desktop or mobile device. The wow-factor of that type of functionality is pretty low; a lot of online services already allow that type of playback. But Play revolutionized the way music is stored on the cloud by what is actually stored on the cloud.

Google’s software scans your hard drive for songs and then matches them with songs it already has on its servers, uploading only the songs Google doesn’t recognize.

Google’s new offering, called All-Access, is a fee-based service that will be available on a number of devices but, oddly enough, not on any iOS devices. Instead of delivering a knockout punch to the Apple iTunes behemoth, Google has opened the door to more Apple domination of the music world. On top of all that, it is entering a space that already is dominated by streaming services such as Pandora, Rhapsody and Spotify.

So I wanted to take a look at the “big players” in the space and how they are doing it.

Pandora Radio is the seasoned veteran in the streaming music game. Founded in 2000, this free, ad-based service lets you build “radio stations” that play the music you want to hear. Using what is known as the Music Genome Project, Pandora takes your particular song, artist or genre, and finds similar types of music which it pumps out to you for as long as you are willing to listen – except the Gangsta Death Polka genre, which, sadly, comprises just three songs at the time of this writing.

Pandora is available on almost every device imaginable. In fact, a number of automobile manufacturers are including the Pandora app in new vehicles, and an equal number of automobile sound systems are building the app directly into the radios. Pandora does offer a paid version of its service called Pandora One. The cost is next to nothing and delivers the same service minus the advertising.

Pandora is a great service if you just want to sit back and listen to the kind of music you like without having to put a lot of thought behind it, and the Music Genome Project does a great job of selecting tracks based on your preferences.

Although it has been around for about seven years, Spotify has absolutely exploded in the last 15 months with social sharing and integration driving much of the growth. Spotify behaves a lot like iTunes; it is based on and built around playlists – the digital version of mix tapes. You simply search for songs in the music database and then add them into a playlist of your own creation. In addition, you can share or subscribe to playlists that others have created. Go and check out my playlist “Grocery Store Romance,” a collection of all those awesome adult contemporary songs subtly shaping/shifting your emotions as you peruse the dairy aisle. You’ll love it – or you’ll hate it. Either way, we’ll make a digital connection together, and that has got to be worth something. Right?

Speaking of digital connections, as I mentioned earlier, Spotify is capable of social sharing. That means that if you enable it, Spotify will broadcast to your Facebook friends what you are listening to. So just be conscious of that when you bust out the jams; the guys at the motorcycle club might not understand or share your celebration of the Celine Dion catalog.

One drawback to Spotify is that some artists and/or record labels haven’t released their music to be consumed through the service, but if you already own digital copies of the music, Spotify’s player will allow you to play them like any other player would. You just can’t share the songs through playlists unless the other person listening to your playlist has also purchased the digital copy of the music.

Spotify comes in three flavors: Free (always awesome), Unlimited and Premium. Both of the paid versions allow you to listen to your music sans ads; premium lets you listen on all your devices and even allows you to download music so you can listen when you are offline – think road trip across Nebraska. Oh, and both paid plans are month-to-month; no contracts.

Rhapsody is just a year younger than Pandora and has a service offering that is a mix of what Pandora and Spotify offer with some added bells and whistles – figuratively, not literally, unless you are into bell-and-whistle choirs. It is also only available as a paid service, which in turn, delivers interruption-free music to you.

For those of you who just can’t seem to get comfortable with interruption-free music or those of you who are fans of talk radio but still want to break free of the transistor, never fear. iHeart Radio’s app allows you to stream live radio through your mobile device. All that blood-pressure-raising, talk radio goodness outside of the confines of your vehicle. Is it a coincidence that there is a lower incidence of road rage being reported?

Maybe the mantra, “Things used to be a whole lot simpler…” really means that there used to be fewer choices. I can appreciate that. But when it comes to music, there are plenty of choices out there, and getting that goodness into your ears has never been easier.

Michael D. Wailes is an interactive developer at Burns Marketing and Communications in Johnstown. If you have questions or would like to suggest a topic for a future Geek Chic column, email him at news@ncbr.com.