pandora gold charms,thomas sabopandora homepage collier,school bus bully attackers.Internet radio services deliver endless music suited to your tastes, or can connect you with live radio broadcasts all over the world. This guide covers the top services to help you pick the best choice for your listening habits.
Editors
Editors note, July 8, 2015: This post has been updated to include details about Apple Music and Beats 1.
Radio predates albums, cassettes, CDs and MP3s, so its no surprise that Internet radio came before on-demand music streaming. What started as a just a few companies, is now populated by tons of Internet choices and nearly every on-demand streaming service has some kind of radio feature. Todays best options deliver customizable stations with a set it and forget it approach, or let you listen to live broadcasts from all over the world.
In this guide, Ill outline the big names in Internet radio, running through their features and what makes them unique. I wont cover the on-demand streaming services that offer radio-like features, but you can read all about them in CNETs guide to streaming music.
Before we get started, heres a brief disclaimer: CBS, the parent company of CNET, also owns Last.fm, Radio1
Around since 2000, dominates the Internet radio scene. Thats due in part to its secret sauce, called the Music Genome Project, a system that analyzes songs for 450 distinct musical characteristics to understand what makes a song unique. Using that information, Pandora finds songs that sound alike or complement each other to build your stations.
In my years of using Pandora, Ive found that it does a great job of creating stations that flow together almost seamlessly. The service even explains why it chose songs for each station with a short blurb about the musical characteristics of a song.
When it comes to tuning a station, you have a few options. The best way is to vote up and down songs to give feedback, which helps Pandora understand your musical tastes. For tracks that dont fit with a stations vibe, you can move them to another station thats more appropriate. Annoying songs that get too much play time can be shelved so they dont show up in the rotation for a while. Finally, you can edit stations to add more songs or artists from which Pandora can draw inspiration and remove upvoted and downvoted tracks.
Pandora is a free service that relies on ads to make money. Youll hear and see ads quite frequently, almost one between every song. With a free account, you also get the chance to skip six songs per hour per station and up to 24 total skips per day for all of your stations. Skips are counted as selecting the skip button, downvoting tracks and shelving music with the Im tired of this track option.
For more freedom to skip songs and remove ads, youll need to pay $4.99 per month for Pandoras paid service, One. Pandora One offers higher-quality streaming (up to 192Kbps on the Web only), five hours of continuous music without pauses, and unlimited skips per day. However the six skips per hour per station limit still applies.
The service has extensive biographies of bands and artists, with descriptions of their musical style, their discographies and similar artist recommendations.
Pandora can get stuck playing the same several songs over and over, especially if you listen to the same stations frequently.
Best for: If you crave intelligent radio stations that flow well and give you plenty of control to tweak your music.
Next up is , which is Apples new on-demand streaming service that includes two prominent radio features worth mentioning in this guide. With Apple Music you get Internet radio and live radio on your phone or desktop, both for free with some caveats. The service is included with iOS as a standalone app and built into iTunes on the desktop.
Originally introduced in 2013, has been rolled into and offers the same Internet radio features as before, with some new additions. Like other Internet radio apps, you can either create your own stations or browse the ones already available. Apple built several new stations for Apple Music, such as Mixtape (hits from the 80s and early 90s) and On The Floor (dance hits).
Depending on the type of station you play, your tuning options are different. With stations you create, you can tell Apple Music to play more songs like the current track or never play it again. Other options include adding the song to your iTunes Wish List to purchase later and sharing it with other apps, like Facebook or email.
For the stations that Apple has created, you can only heart a song, which tells the app that you like it, or add it to your iTunes Wish List. Dont like it? Your only choice is to skip the song. On any station you can only skip forward, not rewind or go back.
Apple Music introduced a new listening experience named Beats 1. Its a live, 24/7 radio station created by Apple and hosted by DJs in London, New York and Los Angeles. Its up to the DJs to pick the tunes, so the music varies throughout the day. You cannot skip tracks here, since its live, but you can save songs for later so you remember them. Beyond music, Beats 1 also hosts interviews and discussions about new music. There are a few other live radio options available in the app, mostly ESPN, NPR and other talk radio choices.
As it works now, iTunes Radio is meant for people who already use an iPhone or iPad. Theres no way to listen on Android, at least until later this year. With the Internet stations, theres a limit of six skips per hour, per station, and youll hear ads between songs. The upshot is that its completely free with a free Apple account. If youre willing to pay $9.99 per year, you can get an Apple Music subscription, which includes on-demand streaming and ad-free radio.
For live radio natics, is the 21st-century way to listen. It lets you browse and listen to 100,000-plus live radio stations from your local area or all over the world. Instead of constantly switching between stations to see whats playing, you can see that beforehand in the app or via TuneIns site, and then select the station to hear that music or show.
Stations are grouped by location and genre, everything from Adult Contemporary and Top 40, to Talk Radio, Sports and News. TuneIn also includes podcasts, if youre into that. As you listen, the service learns about your listening habits and recommends stations for your musical tastes.
Unlike Pandora and others on this list, TuneIn does not create on-demand stations. Everything youll hear in the service is from a live station that is currently broadcasting somewhere in the world. While you cannot search for songs or artists to create stations, you can search to see if any live stations on TuneIn are currently playing your vorite music, and then tune into them.
A stand-out feature on TuneIns Web player is that you can see the previous songs a station has played, so youre never guessing what the song is. For some stations, you can also see upcoming shows in a schedule.
TuneIn has apps for all the major mobile platforms; both a free, ad-supported option and TuneIn Pro, which requires a one-time $9.99 charge. The Pro version removes ads from the app itself (not from the radio broadcasts) and lets you record shows and music to listen to later.
TuneIns great if you have vorite stations from different parts of your country or the world and cant hear them on your local broadcasts. It really opens up your radio selection beyond what your car stereo can do, which makes TuneIn great for driving. It also works as great guide for stations in your local area, showing descriptions of the content.
Much like Pandora, lets you build or browse stations based on your vorite music. The difference here is that, with a paid subscription, you can play songs on demand and download them for offline listening.
Slacker also promotes a human-focused approach, using music ns and experts to create stations, instead of algorithms. Those music ns are responsible for Slackers impressive library of precreated stations, which include those centered on new music, genre essentials and an artists best work, plus their influences. One particularly cool station theme is Artist Takeover, where artists, actors, YouTube celebrities and even TV ensembles, (like the cast of Archer for instance) act as the host and DJ. Those stations have audio blurbs that introduce and explain the song selection. Because of all these special stations, Slacker is more like a guide for music enthusiasts, built by enthusiasts, than purely an Internet radio service.
On the Web player and in the apps, you can browse featured stations, and those that suit a particular activity, such as working out or getting motivated. You can fine-tune a station with sliders that control the amount of popular, newer and vorite songs from an artist or genre.
Like Pandora, Slacker gives you six skips per hour with a free account, and the service helpfully gives you a counter next to the skip button so you see how many you have left. Small design touches like that help set Slacker apart, giving it a cool yet intuitive style.
Slacker offers two paid plans, Radio Plus and Unlimited. Plus gives you unlimited skips on stations, no ads and offline listening for your stations. The Unlimited plan takes it a step further and lets you play songs on demand, create custom playlists and play albums and playlists offline, in addition to all of the features of Plus.
Rhapsody is best known for its on-demand streaming service, but it has a standalone radio option, too. This is the only pick on this list that doesnt have a free option, since it costs $4.99 per month after a 14-day trial. However, if youre a T-Mobile customer with the right plan, you can get it at no extra charge.
With , there are no ads and you get unlimited skips for all your stations. Like the others, you can create your own stations or browse by genre, artist and recommendations from Rhapsody. You can tune your stations with a thumbs up or thumbs down, and tapping the Favorite button (the heart) saves the current track to your library and downloads it for offline listening. However, youre limited to just 25 songs that you can save to your vorites.
Rhapsody gives you some tools to control the music playback, with an equalizer and streaming quality settings. You can pick from a variety of preset equalizers for different genres of music or simply change the various frequency sliders yourself to get the best sound. Over in settings you can pick between 64Kbps, 192Kbps and 320Kbps streaming quality.
Like TuneIn, you can listen to thousands of live radio stations, though the selection doesnt seem as vast. You can set your location to find stations in your area or pick a station from anywhere in the world. Unfortunately, with live radio, you cannot see what songs are playing, but Rhapsodys Track Match feature (available on the mobile apps) determines the song and gives you the option to save it your vorite tracks.
Out of the options listed above, our top pick for Internet radio is Pandora for its design and abundant, but not excessive features. For the best listening experience, spend the $4.99 monthly fee for Pandora One, which gets rid of the annoying and abundant ads in the free version.
If you prefer to hear live broadcast terrestrial radio, TuneIn is your best bet. It has hundreds of thousands of radio stations from all over the US and around the globe, including tens of thousands that you wouldnt be able to hear from your local broadcasts.
For now, we arent evaluating Apple Musics radio features and Beats 1 because we havent been able to test the free, ad supported radio-only experience just yet. Once our 90-day free trial period ends, well do so and update this section.
The list above is by no means meant to be exhaustive, and there are plenty of other radio-streaming services you can use. Here are few off-the-beaten path options if youre looking for more choices.
is very similar to TuneIn, letting you listen to thousands of live radio stations around the world without even creating an account. By signing up, you can listen to iHeartRadios custom stations based on your vorite artists.
Though it was acquired by Google, is still around, delivering radio stations for every mood and activity. On its website and mobile apps, you pick a station based on what youre doing or feeling, and it will deliver hand-picked songs. The available stations change often throughout the day, taking you from waking up, commuting, working all day, hitting the gym and relaxing after dinner.
Another service that works without signing up is Jango. Its a , yet very well-designed option that lets you create any station or browse options by artist or genre. Whats great about it is that it pulls together tons of info about each artist, with links to YouTube videos, lyrics, tweets and biographies. And for each station, it shows the artists you can expect to hear, which I really like.
Lastly, Dash Radio is a newcomer that uses DJs to pick the music, instead of computers. Each station is curated and hosted by a DJ, the most mous of whom is Snoop Dogg. On each station, you can see what song is playing and tune in to listen.
