There are a bevy of music streaming apps out there, all offering different features; personalized radio, cloud storage, traditional radio station access, and social media sharing. In this sea of apps I’ve rounded up the top 5 Android music apps that the Google Play Store can offer. So grab your device, strap on those bedazzled headphones and rock out!
Google Play Music
The Google Play Music app offers pretty much everything you could want from a music app. With a clean interface and intuitive browsing system, this app makes it easy to find your favorite jams. Google also allows users to upload up to 20,000 to Google’s servers via a desktop app, allowing users access to uploaded and purchased online music library for free. The app also allows users to keep music offline, and makes instant mixes with ease.
Amazon MP3
The Amazon MP3 app offers pretty much the same features of the Google Play Music app, but with some differences. This app allows access to any music content previously purchased through Amazon, and allows access to uploaded music as well. As far as storage space goes, Amazon allows users to upload 250 songs for free, and up to 250,000 if users subscribe to Cloud Player Premium.
Tune-In Radio
Tune-In Radio is the best radio app I have found thus far. It provides quick access to 70,000 live radio stations and 2 million podcasts, concerts and shows. The interface is easy to use, allowing users to easily add their stations to a favorites list for later access. TuneIn Radio is fully integrated with tunein.com, so if you’re already a user of that service, your favorites will be instantly be accessible on your Android device.
Spotify
Spotify has definitely changed the landscape of online music streaming by combining many elements of other services into one app. Spotify allows users to stream music from it’s comprehensive online library, and can also create stations based off of any selected track. Much like Pandora, the stations feature plays songs that are similar to the one chosen. With it’s Facebook integration, Spotify also lets Facebook friends check out what you’re listening to. Spotify offers a premium service, which removes those pesky audio ads and allows users to sync playlists and tracks to their devices.
Pandora
Pandora has been around for awhile, but it’s still a solid choice for free, personalized streaming music listening. Just type in a song or artist into Pandora and it will create a personalized radio station for your listening enjoyment. Pandora has partnered with The Music Genome Project in an effort to “capture the essence of music at the fundamental level” using almost 400 attributes to describe songs and a complex mathematical algorithm to organize them. The algorithms do a good job of matching songs, but every once in a while you may still have to skip a Coldplay song or two.
So there’s our top 5 music apps for Android. Are you surprised? Most of these applications are very popular, but for good reason. Luckily, there are a ton of more music apps in the Google Play Store that went unmentioned in the post, like Slacker Radio. What are some of your favorite music apps? Sound off in the comments below!
[Featured photo via Kevin Pearce]