Spotify or Pandora

Think about it, if you could download the music you'd just sign up for a month once year and binge-download. I-tunes is a download service where you pay for each download, Spotify, Pandora and, Tidal are streaming services where you pay for access to content on a monthly basis. You are basically "renting" and get no equity or ability to keep the content.

I've never used Spotify but I agree that Pandora is much better as a radio-like service to just turn on and listen to. I think the SQ of their pay per month service is quite acceptable and I use it pretty regularly.

Love Pandora's easy and logical interface and "good enough" sound. Spotify? Perhaps the worst interface I've ever encountered. Just my 2Cents worth.

Fortunately, you can try them all for free...

You can create playlists with Spotify that reside on your hard drive...leastways,
you don't have to be logged into the 'net or Spotify to play them. You do have to
log in to Spotify at least 1x/month to keep them "active", otherwise
they expire after 30 days. Used this to provide music during breaks in a training
seminar I coordinated...did not have access to the 'net due to a corporate firewall
but could play my Spotify playlists just the same. Playlists can be full albums if
you want. On the other hand and as you might expect, it does not appear
possible to burn such playlists to a CD.

Interesting, Ghosthouse. So it seems the spotify "playlist" has some kind of DRM that expires in a month, requiring you to maintain your monthly subscription to access them. Seems like a very interesting "hybrid" between the itunes model and the streaming model. Too bad the UI seems to suck! We can only hope that as bandwidth increases over time, it won't make any sense to use lossy compression algorithms to send digital files over the 'net.