I finally received my Spotify invitation today, a week after the company decided to open it’s services to U.S. users. There was tons of hype surrounding the services from people who have been using it from the European countries (or those who got in via proxies). While I wasn’t in the first batch of those who were invited to use the service, it wasn’t something I thought of as a big deal. Having access to Google music beta via an invitation, and a 30-day trial of MOG, what else can Spotify provide me that are not already in those two services? In addition to Pandora, Slacker radio and my iPod player—I got everything covered as far as music is concerned.

Having to choose between the different types of music services can be overwhelming, so let me go through and analyze a few popular music services that I’ve used and find out which one is the best option for you.

Google Music Beta (website)
If you have access to Google Music already, they offer a rich user interface that allows you to browse or manage your music collection on the web or smart phone device (only Androids are supported currently). The service is completely free but it only allows you to play music that you already own. You basically have to tell the desktop application on where your music resides in your local hard drive folder, and it will detect any addition that you make to it and upload it to the cloud automatically. You will have to install an application that runs in your system tray. The service is great if you own your own music collection and tired of having to manually sync your music to your mp3 or smart phone device every time you add a new music to your collection. I’ve uploaded approximately 20GB worth of data (4,500 MP3s) to their cloud and it appears like you’re limited to 20,000 files—which is already lot of music!

Pandora (website) and Slacker Radio (website)
I combined these since they’re almost identical in features set, except Pandora doesn’t offer radio stations. The goal of these two services (including last.fm), is to let you listen to a random music (new music discovery) based on the music genre or artist chosen. These services allows you listen on your mobile device and the web completely free, but with a few ad disruptions every few songs or so. You are also limited to certain amount of skips and limitation on how many hours you can listen per month (Pandora gives you 40 hours). Pandora is only $3/month and only gives you a randomized music with higher bit-rate on both desktop and mobile devices. Slacker on the other hand is $3.99 but offers you in addition to what Pandora offers, access to different radio stations. Slacker also offers a $9.99 premium plan which in addition to their basic plan, also gives you on-demand music listening similar to MOG (which I’ll be covering next).

MOG (website)
I’ve been using MOG services trial for almost 30 days now (about to expire any day now) and I’m pretty happy with it. Similar to Google Music, their online and mobile device’s user interface is very rich. The only problem that I have with them is their all-or-nothing service approach. It’s either you pay for their service or you wouldn’t be able to use them since they don’t have a free plan at the moment; hence the reason why they offer a 30-day trial. Their service excels at providing you access to millions of music on-demand and create a playlist. The currently provide two subscription models—$4.99 which allows you to use their service on your web browser only, and $9.99 which allows you to use their service on both your browser and your mobile device with ability to download the music for offline listening.

Spotify (website)
Their music service in my opinion is sort of like a hybrid between Google Music, and MOG except that they provide a free plan (granted that you have an access to their service). The basic premises is that, Spotify allows you to sync your own music and have access to on-demand music on the go. The free subscription only allows you to listen to both your collection as well as their on-demand music collection anywhere using a desktop app (with ads). The next plan is the “unlimited plan” for $4.99 which is similar to free but with no ads (and possible unlimited hours of listening—although I couldn’t find this information anywhere on their website). Last but not the least is their “premium plan” services for $9.99 which in addition to “unlimited plan” allows you to listen on your mobile device with offline listening mode. Spotify automatically scans your iTunes playlist and adds it to your Spotify playlist.

Amazon Cloud Drive (website)
Amazon’s service is the first one that I’ve tried out of the ones I’ve mentioned. Having a 5GB storage by default for free accounts, they allow you to upload your music through their desktop application and listen to them on both desktop and currently just Android devices. However, they also give you an option to upgrade your storage to 20GB for only $20/year. The cool thing about their service since they also have a storefront for selling MP3s is that, anything that you purchase doesn’t count towards your quota as far as storage is concern. The service is similar to Google Music’s version except for its limited storage, but offers you the ability to purchase music. I hear rumors that Google is also coming up with its own music storefront to compete with Apple and Amazon.

I’ve covered pretty much the more popular ones although there’s a few other ones out there with similar feature sets. Having a basic knowledge on what each music service offers should somewhat clear up any confusion for anyone looking for a music service. Each service has its own strength and weaknesses, and knowing which feature you’d like to have is a good starting point.