Music Tastemakers?
What?
Seeking to capitalize on its dominance of the Android smartphone market, Samsung has launched a free online streaming music service in the US that's only available to owners of its Galaxy-branded mobes. Just why the service is called Milk Music is hard to fathom. But it's powered by Pandora competitor Slacker Radio, it has 13 …
Get the tunein radio app on any mobile OS and you have 100,000 stations available for free.
Pay a couple of quid and you can record etc as well
Another case of a company giving you something you don't need.
Anyway haven't Nokia & Apple been doing this for ages as well....
TuneIn is crap. The android app is riddled with bugs and they refuse to fix them. I paid for the Pro app for the recording feature...worked fine until they broke it with a 'new' release. Repeated e-mails to their support people have been fruitless. Just look at the reviews on Play, lots of very angry people.
"Anyway haven't Nokia & Apple been doing this for ages as well...."
That would probably be why Samsung is doing it. I don't want to get into the copy vs innovation BS but anything that Samsung sees as an industry trend, they are going to try to capitalize on. Just look at Fitbit and the new Fit Gear or whatever it is called.
The benefit to owning Samsung stuff is they basically have EVERYTHING, from TVs to phones to laptops to dishwashers, fridges, washers, dryers... and eventually it will ALL be internet enabled and all be networked, so you can play your Milk Music inside your fridge.
I have to heartily disagree with you, Big Ted. A radio tuner app is a little different than apps like this or Slacker. You're not at the mercy of someone else's musical choices, plus there are no commercials or ads.
The ability to create your own station that caters to your individual tastes makes it more than a great addition to your phone. Beside that, with 96gb of storage space on my Note 3, space is not an issue.
The only shortcomings I see so far in this app is that while you can like a song, you can't like the band. Nor can you ban a song or artist like Slacker allows you to do. Other than that, it seems to work very well.
OTOH, if you listen to planet rock say, using their app that works very well (on my platform at least better than TuneIn), you are indeed at the mercy of other peoples' choices, like Alice Cooper for instance. Still, what does he know, same with those other music professionals.
It means I get to hear bands and songs I wouldn't otherwise hear, the ads are not wonderful of course but not too intrusive since I don't listen for long periods as a rule.
More importantly, it uses no data so saves having a large data allowance, is available in the car and at home. Also on one's person with an actual radio I guess.
The above applies to other music genres too I imagine although they don't get Alice.
And, there is Nokia Mixmusic, which is free, ad-free, allows downloading over WiFi for off-line listening elsewhere, is curated, selects music based on your library, allows favourites etc. and following bands, tells you about upcoming gigs/releases for those bands.
All-in-all, I never get why people pay for music streaming, both in actual cost and not-really-hidden data costs.
Still, nowt as queer as folk.
If it comes to the UK I might give it a try if the catalogue is up to scratch. I have spotify premium right now, and while I love the service the Android app is pretty shoddy. It has improved but it has a lot of bugs and despite many people complaining on their forums they never get acknowledged by Spotify. I will bravely assume that Samsung are promoting an app which works properly on their devices and give it a go!
On my S4 Spotify has the following "unexpected features":
-It often plays the same song multiple times in a row when on shuffle mode (and no I don't have repeat on!).
-It sometimes just stops playing one or two songs into a playlist. Restarting will play another song and then it stops again. You have to force close it to get it to play continuously.
-The lock screen play controls disappear and reappear at random.
-The equalizer randomly stops working until you open the settings menu again. Then the app seems to "remember" it is supposed to be on! This is so annoying I gave up and disabled it.
-Periodically it will just completely refuse to start playing anything. Force closing and restarting it offline with airplane mode disabled is the only fix I've found.