Are there any Apps that Play Music in the Background?
Many people use gadgets to listen to music, but the capabilities of the built-in player are often not enough to fully enjoy their favorite tracks. Let’s take a look at the best music services and apps today and understand their capabilities.
The advent of web radio and streaming has ushered in a new era for the music industry. The accessibility, ease of listening, and personalization of music have led to the fact that we listen to it much more often. Experts from GlobalWebIndex, together with Universal Music and Spotify, surveyed almost 57 thousand people and found that the majority of users already listen to music online – on average, 64%.
Streaming is online streaming. Streaming media refers to music, video, and information that a user receives continuously from a streaming provider. Most of the streaming market is in the esports segment, where gamers show online how they play their games. Streamers are also called video blogging authors in the genre of music, cooking, travel, unboxing, and other areas.
Don’t forget that the SoundAudio site provides a library of background music to download and use. You can always find the right music for your project.
Have a good mood!
What happens to the music itself
Spotify and Apple Music are not only changing the way we listen, they’ve changed the music itself. Streaming services provide artists with statistics on tracks and user behavior: you can see how many times they played a song, at what second they switched to another when they increased the volume of the track as they listened. Musicians look at all these indicators and write tracks based on similar metrics. So the authors try to immediately catch the attention of the audience and, as a rule, prefer to start their tracks with a catchy beat or even a chorus.
Using machine learning technology, platforms like Spotify analyze listener behavioral data, including the number of times they listened at different times of the day. Such analytics are used to form playlists – for example, it is believed that tracks in the spirit of “Acoustic Calm” or “Nature Sounds” are logical to invite users to listen to before bed.
All this is in order for the platform to automatically promote a particular track higher in the charts. Typically, for this to be listened to for at least 30 seconds. Another life hack is to open a track with a sample already familiar to the mass listener (this can be done in the format of a conditional remix). This way he will most likely not switch over what is already familiar or causes a feeling of nostalgia. This technique was used by Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj to record the single “Swish Swish”.
Among other things, songs are getting shorter: the average track length has dropped from four minutes and thirty seconds in 2000 to three minutes and forty seconds. Initially, the restrictions were dictated by the radio market: the station’s airtime is scheduled in seconds, so a track length of three to four minutes was considered optimal. Now experts believe that songs are getting shorter due to a change in the principle of payment: platforms charge money for listening as soon as the notorious mark of 30 seconds is fixed. The need to write long songs has disappeared: a musician with five three-minute songs will earn more than one who has made three five-minute songs.
We can listen to music constantly and at any time. Albums have given way to smart playlists, in which tracks are assembled based on user preference or mood – music is becoming cheaper and more accessible than ever. Streaming services encourage listening to prefab playlists, so listeners are less tied to specific musicians.
Research has shown that streaming has increased the number of music tracks you listen to by 49% over what it was before platforms like Spotify. They also found that the number of unique artists they listened to in half a year via streaming services increased by 36%. However, listeners acknowledge that music is now less valued than it was before streaming.
Experts often call the streaming media of the future. At the same time, popular streaming platforms have already entered the set of famous tools in the digital world.
So TOP 9 applications and services for listening to music in the background:
Spotify is the pioneer of music streaming, arguably the most famous. It offers a range of carefully selected music search services, including the Discover Weekly playlist, and is constantly introducing new ones such as Stations.
In the race between Spotify Premium and Apple Music, Spotify surpasses Spotify as the best music streaming service overall, thanks to its easy-to-use interface, expansive catalog, and better device compatibility. Spotify also offers our favorite tier of free tier: without paying a dime, you can still stream via Spotify Connect to multiple devices without even providing a credit card.
Spotify’s biggest selling point is its automatic playlists, tailored to your musical taste, mood, and genre. Feel free to play one of them and Spotify will cheer you up.
App in Google Play
App in App Store
It’s a sea of music. Download and listen to music offline wherever you are. Create your own playlists and listen to Apple Music mixes based on the songs you listen to. Apple Music also has personalized recommendations for playlists, albums, and more. Be careful, the service and some features may not be available in all countries. The subscription renews automatically after the trial period.
App in Google Play
App in App Store
The Amazon Music Unlimited catalog includes “tens of millions of songs,” but this is standard wording for this kind of project. The service has the music of all three major music labels: Sony, Universal, and Warner.
Especially for the new service, and Amazon also has a Prime Music service, the company has re-created software for iOS and Android. Amazon also highlights deep integration with Echo devices, and more specifically with the voice assistant Alexa. For example, a smart speaker can be asked to play the latest album of an artist, a list of the most popular songs from the last month, and so on. But that’s not all, Alexa is able to determine the composition by the part of the text that the user will speak with the smart speaker.
App in Google Play
App in App Store
The new music streaming service, YouTube Music, will primarily appeal to those users who are more likely to consume music through YouTube. It largely repeats the good old Google Music, but now you can not only listen to songs but also watch video clips. The name itself, as it were, speaks for itself – this is musical YouTube. Now you have the opportunity to more closely follow the work of your favorite artists and bands, listen to the latest hits, watch popular videos, and discover new music.
App in Google Play
App in App Store
This service has been helping people to determine what kind of music sounds next to them for several years. Previously, only mobile device owners could use the service. But after Shazam was bought by Apple, a similar application appeared for macOS and the latest versions of Windows.
The service database contains information about 11 million tracks, and this figure is constantly growing. To recognize a melody, it is enough to record a 10-second fragment of it. The program will display the name of the artist and the title of the song, as well as a link to the content store, where you can legally buy it. Information about the found track can be easily “shared” on popular social networks or simply sent to friends in the messenger.
A couple of nice additional features: Shazam can sync with other music services (for example, Spotify) and search for songs by text fragment.
App in Google Play
App in App Store
Now the Deezer library has about 53 million tracks and a bunch of possibilities. First of all, I would like to note the presence of a Hi-Fi subscription, with which you can listen to music in Audio CD-quality directly from online – the sound here is of the highest quality for streaming services. Nice design and high speed of the interface are very pleasing compared to other services (such as Apple Music, for example).
There is a Flow button, when you click on it, a personal selection is launched for you with exactly the music you like. To do this, Deezer constantly monitors what you are listening to and draws conclusions about whether you like the music or not. This also works great when compiling individual playlists and artists.
As in any other similar service, you are free to download entire albums, selections, and tracks separately for offline listening. A very useful feature for me right from the first day was the availability of lyrics for tracks.
The service runs on Andriod, iOS, it has a web version, and it also supports Smart TVs, Apple TVs, popular sound systems, and even smartwatches. Deezer has automatic playlists by genre, current artists, playlists that are generated automatically depending on the music you listen to, as well as podcasts and online radio.
Deezer has a free version that cannot save music offline, as well as premium and family subscriptions.
App in Google Play
App in App Store
Popular platform with social media features. No registration is required to listen to music on Soundcloud. Due to its simplicity, it is very popular with indie musicians who publish their recordings there.
Soundcloud does not have music from major labels such as Sony and Warner Music Group. Service users consider this a plus, as there is a lot of completely new experimental music on Soundcloud that has not yet appeared in traditional distribution channels.
App in Google Play
App in App Store
Pandora, one of the most popular streaming radio services in the US. More flexible than most competitors, and Premium attracts more subscribers, even if it lags behind the competition in overall directory size. Pandora analyzes each track for 450 different attributes to make better recommendations. The sound quality is one of the lowest even with a Premium subscription (192 Kbps).
The service loses the competition and is not available outside the United States.
App in Google Play
App in App Store
The service differs slightly from other music streaming services in that it is aimed at those who want higher resolution audio and therefore provide excellent audio quality.
This means you can listen to your music in full CD quality, exactly the way it was meant to be heard. It should be noted, however, that you will need better audio equipment and Wi-Fi or a wired connection to your playback device to truly enjoy the benefits that lossless audio provides.
App in Google Play
App in App Store
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