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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. 

2. Google Play Music

AP Photo/Jeff Chiu
Chris Yerga, engineering director of Android, speaks about Google play in San Francisco. The new service offers a lot of eye candy to go with the tunes. The song selection of around 18 million tracks is comparable to popular music streaming services such as Spotify. A myriad of playlists curated along different genres provides a big playground for music lover.

Google beat Apple into the online music streaming business when it launched Google Play Music in May. The service lets you listen to music from Google's library without ads, store up to 20,000 of your own songs online, and access music anywhere without having to syncing your devices. In a stab at iTunes, Google Play Music also has a system that lets you buy new music through its interface. 

Cost: Google Play Music's standard version is free, though the sign up does require you to enter credit card information, making it easier, and perhaps more tempting to purchase a few songs as you listen. The All Access version, which lets you create personalized radio stations and listen with unlimited song skips, costs $9.99 per month.

Sharing: Google Play Music makes sharing easy via the Google Plus social network. 

Limits: To get Google Play Music to recommend songs, you have to pay, unlike with Pandora and Spotify.     

Devices: Accessible via play.google.com. For Android and iOS devices, you have to download the Google Play Music app. 

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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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