adventures in mobile music listening
I’m generally pretty on board with modern technologies, but the concept of physically storing music in a phone still seems weird. Then again, I’m one who still buys used to buy a whole lot of CDs, even when no one did anymore. So it was exciting times cloud-based music apps came on the scene.
Until last week, my phone was a Motorola Droid X, which was disappointing on all counts except for its compatibility with a couple cool music-listening apps: Amazon MP3 and Google Music Beta. Amazon MP3 initially had the promise. It seemed like the clear first choice because all my digital music-buying is through Amazon, but its desktop interface was kind of cumbersome and confusing, and it had a low-ish cap on free storage. I gave up on uploading already-purchased music after a few albums.
Google Music Beta is awesome. (Want an invite?) For non-home-computer desktop listening, it’s almost that Lala replacement I’d been looking for. Yes, it took weeks to initially upload everything, but now, I have access to my entire (and automatically updated) music library at work. And anywhere else.
The Android app gave that same full-library access, which meant being able to listen to many, many more potential tunes than could fit on my tiny, very old-school 8 GB iPod nano. It skipped a lot less often than I would’ve expected, too. Overall, it all worked so well that I never imported a single song file into my old phone.
So, now. iPhone. No more phone-based Google Music Beta, obviously. There’s iCloud, but free storage is much more limited than what Google gave. I tried to get over my “putting mp3s in my phone” hang-up by imagining that the phone contained a little iPod (which, I guess, it sort of does… or, at least, the homescreen icon wants us to think that).
The included music app looks lovely, but I’ve only put in the Must Have At All Times essential albums so far. While I continue on the search for the Perfect Cloud-Based Music App (mSpot Music? TunesAccess? SongBox Player?), I’ve come across a couple other amazing music-related apps: Songkick and Band of the Day. Everyone else has already been using these forever, right? Oh.
Songkick, which tells me when artists I like are performing nearby, depends on putting a lot more music in the phone to work properly, but it looks like it’ll be wonderful once I really get it going, saving a lot of time spent scanning bands’ websites (many of which don’t seem to be updated anymore — they just do Facebook) to make sure I’m not missing anything.
Band of the Day has well-written original bios and descriptions for spotlighted artists that, with only one exception, I had never heard of. Bingo. A new music exploration tool, in nice daily doses and across a wide range of genres. I’m sure there will be a lot to report back on.
