Streaming Music Apps

MOG

Rdio


Rdio's web UI is well-designed, and navigation is silky smooth. Load a track and it starts playing in a module on the left side of your browser window. If you hop to another page inside Rdio, the music keeps playing without so much as a stutter. You also have a "collection," which corrals your favorite songs and albums. The mobile app is also a winner, combining all the social and search elements of the web-based version with a UI that comes close to mimicking the iOS music player (always a good thing).
Rdio is all about simplifying the experience down to two core elements, listening and exploration/sharing via social elements. You can add other users as friends much like you would on Twitter. When you log in to the site, you're greeted with a colorful mosaic of album art that either shows your most played songs/albums, your friends' most played songs/albums, or that of the entire Rdio network. For the casual music fan, this is a good way to stay up on not just what's new, but also to know what the people you surround yourself with are into.

Rhapsody

Streaming Rhapsody from the web sucks. Everything from the page design to UI elements to overall responsiveness sucked (it also borderline fails to work in Chrome). Rhapsody also doesn't offer the same type of social element that Rdio or even MOG offers. They have a social element to some degree, but it's so limited in functionality and hard to find that it's borderline useless.
On top of that, if you use anything better than stock computer speakers or cheap earbuds, the audio is noticeably inferior. You hear a lot of static while streaming, which I guess shouldn't come as a huge shock, since bitrate tops out at 128kbps over wi-fi and 64kbps over 3G. Also, there's no web-only option. Everyone pays 10 dollars whether you have a mobile device or not. And speaking of mobile, their iOS app is certainly better than the website, but that said, it still trails behind MOG and Rdio.

Grooveshark

Grooveshark is a bizarre creation. You arrive at the site, where you're greeted by an applet that looks like a file browser and a big search bar. Enter in artist, album or song, and results come up for you to listen to. Despite not having deals with the major labels (mostly just indies), Grooveshark still has most major releases available. How? Well, users are allowed to upload MP3s to the Grooveshark servers where they're accessible by everyone. It's like YouTube for MP3s. I don't know how they're getting away with this, but they are. And it's free (through the browser).

Spotify

While it's already out in Europe, Spotify has yet to launch in the US due to negotiations with the record labels. Who knows how much the service will cost or how many songs will be available when it really does get here, but it looks pretty great. Spotify does much of what the above services do, but it also has a nice-looking desktop app that allows you to merge your local files with their streams under one roof. When you sync your mobile with your computer, all of this is funneled into the mobile app, creating a seamless music experience. Best of both worlds. But it's tough to recommend a product that isn't available to the masses yet.