Quick guide: iTunes Radio vs. Pandora vs. Spotify vs. Rdio vs. Google Play Music

Click through our list of five music streaming sites to see what Apple's new iTunes radio has to live up to. 

4. Spotify

Spotify website
Spotify allows users to sign up through their Facebook account, or using an email address, making it easier to connect to other listeners.

Unlike Pandora, Spotify is an application that you have to download to your computer. Free Spotify accounts give limited access to the app's music library. It can also access music from your iTunes library and post those songs to your listening feed on Facebook or Twitter. A column on the right-side of the application offers suggestions of community playlists – made either by your friends or musicians.

Similar to Pandora, you can create a radio station based off of a song or genre and "like," "dislike," or "skip" songs. Spotify also saves and suggests new stations.

Cost: Spotify is free, but if you want to listen without adverts, get Spotify Unlimited for $4.99 per month on your desktop and laptop. Spotify Premium is also available for $9.99 per month and allows you to both download and stream to all of your devices from Spotfiy's robust music library.

Sharing: The streaming service has a special partnership with Facebook that allows users to link their accounts and suggest playlists to Facebook friends. This feature can also be turned off for greater privacy.  

Limits: As with Pandora, there are pesky advertisements on the free version of Spotify on desktop and laptop versions, plus you need to open a Spotify account (ie. pay) to stream music on your mobile device. 

Devices: Works on Mac, PC, iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android devices.

4 of 5

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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