Spoiled for Choice: Profiles of Some Leading Music Apps Now that music apps play such a big part in our busy lives, it’s important to find the right one for your taste and lifestyle. That can be easier said than done, though, simply because there are so many options out there. Let’s try and bring some clarity by profiling some of the most successful and/or user/friendly products in the field. Whatever choice you make, we hope you continue to enjoy old favorites while also making thrilling new discoveries. Underneath the technology it’s still all about the music. Spotify We’ll begin with Spotify, simply because it’s so well known to many music lovers. The current incarnation of the app allows for more music to be streamed free of charge, but a bigger development may be that subscribers who pay a monthly fee of $9.99 can now save an unlimited amount of tracks that they can then access offline at their leisure. Other user-friendly features include playlists corresponding to the use
YouTube Jonathan Bree’s second solo album, A Little Night Music, confirms how far Bree has travelled since he first achieved prominence with his former band mates in The Brunettes, an outfit that successfully fused indie sounds with somewhat twee bubblegum catchiness . Although served with a heavy dose of ironic detachment, this indie bubblegum amalgam proved to be simultaneously irritating and irresistibly hooky. That’s not what we hear when we listen to ALNM, though. Orchestral maneuvres in the night Although ALNM certainly has its own lighter touches, it deftly situates even those moments within an overall mood that it considerably darker than anything we heard from The Brunettes. As ALNM plays, its combination of orchestral maneuvers and crooning singing can’t help but remind the listener of the sweetly crooned but acerbic lyrics of Lee Hazlewood or the dramatic moodiness of Scott Walker. Unlike the extremely rich orchestration that accompanied Walker’s voice, however, Br