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Did you know there are also at least another 10 best apps like Spotify?
While it may seem like Spotify has it all, the app’s features are limited if you do not pay for a subscription. We have compiled a list of apps that offer other features and benefits, which might best suit your music tastes.
Thankfully, there are lots of great music apps available out there, to ensure you get the best possible experience. Read on for 10 best apps like Spotify that are helping millions of people each day to have access to their favorite the music.
Note that the album and track URI for the same product are different so simply manually switching spotify:album:abc123 to spotify:track:abc123 won’t take you to the same track. Now that you have everything ready, go back into your list of Spotify contacts and start to whip up those emails.
1. Pandora
The popular website Pandora transitioned to an app for both Android and iOS products some time ago. The option of creating your own custom radio station has always been a central feature of Pandora but now you can also use this app on the go.
- Add another device that supports Spotify or has the app (like a speaker or laptop). Connect both devices to the same Wi-Fi network, and log in to Spotify. Listen out loud.
- A free inside look at Spotify salary trends based on 752 salaries wages for 387 jobs at Spotify. Salaries posted anonymously by Spotify employees.
![Product Manager Spotify In App Messaging Product Manager Spotify In App Messaging](/uploads/1/3/3/9/133906460/820736148.png)
Spotify only allows users to have 20 custom stations while Pandora let’s you create up to 100, which gives you plenty of space to showcase your diverse musical taste.
Pandora definitely has the tools and interface to compete with Spotify. The only real downsides to using the free version of the Pandora app is that you can not listen in full as many popular on-demand tracks as you wish. Also, the app limits the amount of songs you can skip.
That said, the subscription fee for a premium user account is only $5, which is half the price of Spotify’s paid plan ($10). Currently Pandora is only available in Australia, New Zealand and the United States due to licensing and copyright concerns. If you’re based in any of these areas, this is definitely one of the best and most affordable apps around. Spotify free without commercials free.
Pandora has also just launched a rebranded new version of its app with iMessage chat allowing you to message your contacts with the standard message features.
2. Deezer
Deezer, the French music service is another app similar to Spotify that let’s you listen to music on demand from their extensive library, including both the ability of a playlist creation and a cool playlist-rating feature.
Listen to radio stations and get access to “hear this”, a create your own tool that shows you new music based on your tastes and to “flow”, another great feature of the app. Other apps in spotify storage iphone. If you choose the paid subscription of Deezer you’ll be able to listen to your music offline from your mobile without any interruptions from ads or previews.
For more offline listening options, check out these 4 music apps that don’t need Wi-Fi.
3. Google Play Music
Google Play Music is another music streaming option, where it’s free to store music you already have – up to 50,000 songs. You can use it anytime as long as you have an Internet connection. For full access to the rest of the music streaming features you’ll need to sign up for a $10 a month plan. On the bright side, you are allowed to purchase and download music onto your computer from Google Play Music, something that you can’t do on Spotify.
The main selling points are that you’re able to download and purchase music directly from Google Play Music, thanks to licensing and copyright coverage from the main Google Play store. This is an option many Spotify users wish they were offered too!
4. Tidal
New kid on the block Tidal owned by rapper Jay Z is also shaping to be an app in the same league as Spotify. One of the biggest reasons for it’s creation is to offer a music streaming option that favors artists, as more money are given directly to them, instead of going through more standard record label channels.
With a library of over 25 million songs and boasting more than 75,000 music videos in high-definition and exclusive video content not available anywhere else; Tidal is making quite the impression.
To be able to stay true to it’s word and provide a premium quality streaming facility, Tidal only caters to paid app users with multiple subscription options available ranging from $10-20 a month. While a little more expensive, you can sign-up for a free trial to see if it’s worth to you paying a little extra.
If you don’t want to pay to stream music, here are 5 best free apps to download music instead.
5. iHeartRadio
IHeartRadio offers more than just music streaming features; it’s also a live radio app. The live radio feature is a nice addition to the standard features. Of course you can’t skip show segments or songs when it’s live!
This app is very similar to Pandora as it gives users the ability to create their own radio stations. In terms of listening to the music on the live stations, all songs are played in full and you don’t have to pay extra to get access to the full music library.
Being able to stream radio and music from your phone makes it a popular choice for on-the-go users, with the ability to view all different types of radio and musical artists by genre.
6. Slacker
The proper name for this app is Slacker Radio. It doesn’t offer real radio stations but it has the feel of a real radio station as you can assemble huge playlists and even write comments in between songs.
Once choosing the paid subscription in Slacker you are able to use its music on-demand and listen to all of your favorite songs. While it might not be quite as big as Spotify is, it has a pretty big music library and it is definitely one of the best curated apps at the lower end of the price range, currently standing at $3.99 a month. This is for a Radio Plus plan, which gives you the power to listen offline, ad-free, and with unlimited skips music – something that other music apps haven’t managed to implement yet. The premium $9.99/month deal gives you full access to the radio station creation tools and all the other features.
7. SoundCloud
I’m going to be a little biased and announce that this is my favorite app for streaming music. When Soundcloud got a meaty iOS upgrade back in 2014, more people started to take note of this music-streaming app.
SoundCloud has flourished as a streaming app because it is heavily connected to social media. This means that it is easy to share any listenable track at a click. Free downloads are sometimes available through file sharing or you can directly download music from online stores.
You’ve got the ability to follow other users at Soundcloud- you can find and post new content by hitting the home button up top to get a musical based feed, showing what has been posted and reposted by those you follow. Just click ‘like’ to add songs to your ‘like collection’ and ‘repost’ to get songs on your personal Soundcloud stream page.
Create almost unlimited playlists (it’s advised to keep lists under 250 songs to help the app function better). By being a SoundCloud Go user, for $9.99/month, they make sure that you won’t have to see any paid ads, although these are infrequent compared to other music streaming apps when choosing the app’s free plan. It also gives you access to a lot of popular music charts that are only playable as a preview when you’re a free-user due to copyright and media laws.
8. Songza
Songza is an App that shows you playlists centered on your listening habits. There is also a time of the day it will ask you what you feel like listening to and thus be giving you playlists to match your mood, opposed to just letting you search for individual artists or songs.
The app is totally free with a clean, bright interface that makes it easy to swipe through playlists. There’s no advertisements on the app and if you like a playlist you can save it or go back to see what you’ve been into most recently.
The Songza app moved over to Google Play in January after being bought by Google – read on to find out all the features now available since it’s transition. Things are certainly looking up for Songza even though it isn’t as traditional as other music streaming apps – it offers you something that is unique and if you really want to do the searching yourself you can, by why bother when Songza knows what you like?
9. YouMusic
Product Manager Spotify In App Messaging Device
Specific to Windows Phone, this app is integrated into the standard Windows phone music player and allows to stream YouTube videos. That’s right you can finally get YouTube music videos without restrictions if you have Windows 8/8.1 phone!
So while YouMusic doesn’t offer you all the features of the other music streaming apps, you can still access most music from there and add it to the YouTube playlist function. The app also keeps running outside of the app so feel free to get on the move. Download it from the store.
10. SoundHound
SoundHound has an audio detection, which allows you to find what song is playing, helps you track songs you’ve already heard or even ones you haven’t heard yet, as it knows what you’re into.
Easily stream or download music from a comprehensive library and import music from your phone if you want to add it to a playlist. A simpler interface, but still great to use and you can pick it up for free from the Windows or Google Store. For more awesome free music streaming apps click here.
Autonomy may be the single most important element for creating engagement in a company. How can anyone feel engaged, let alone inspired, if she feels that some supervisor is always looking over her shoulder? But autonomy is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it spurs creativity and involvement. On the other, unchecked autonomy can lead to ambiguity and inefficiencies, even organizational chaos. To find the right balance, you have to wrestle with three challenges:
Balancing autonomy and accountability. An essential counterweight to autonomy is strict accountability for results, and for the actions and behaviors that deliver those results. A company has to establish a strategy and a purpose that provide context for employees’ actions. It has to put the strategy into practice with measurable objectives, consistent measurement of progress toward those goals, feedback systems to monitor activities along the way, and appropriate consequences for reaching or failing to reach the goals. At their best, companies realize that not everything is easily measurable, or should be measured, and that constant temperature taking and micromanagement are inefficient and demoralizing. They establish transparent boundary conditions and clear expectations. Employees and teams know they will be held accountable, and they know where the guardrails are. They understand the objectives, and they have a great deal of freedom in determining how to reach them within those guardrails. Clarity of purpose and what we call high-resolution strategies, which give people a clear view of where they’re headed, provide the compass that can guide the choices that teams and individuals make when working autonomously.
Balancing freedom to innovate versus following proven routines. The art and science here is determining how to get both outcomes — consistency and innovation — in the right proportion and in the appropriate parts of your organization. In many areas, freedom to innovate is the critical need. Think of new product development, or the parts of the company’s value chain and business model that are undergoing significant reinvention because of digital transformations. In these activities, speed of innovation is critical, and the rallying cry should be autonomy, small teams, and organizational agility. Other areas, however, may benefit from standardized approaches. These are areas where consistent outcomes are essential and where speed of execution comes from deploying common methods, best practices, and enforced routines. The focus here should be on repeatability and efficiency. Each requires speed in different areas, innovation versus execution, and achieves these results in different ways. The challenge in striking the right balance is to know which method should predominate and how to design appropriate ways of working for each area. The wrong approach leads to confusion over goals and to ineffectiveness.
Balancing alignment with control. This task is closely related to the other two. In traditional hierarchical organizations, managers direct the work of subordinates and thereby ensure alignment with broader organizational goals. Spans of control are limited to a reasonable number — typically eight people or fewer — so that managers can effectively oversee their subordinates’ efforts. This organizational model can work well in relatively stable business environments, where the pace of change is modest and where annual planning cycles suffice for managing strategic changes and course corrections. In dynamic business environments, where innovation cycles happen in days or weeks rather than months and years, and where much of the work is cross-functional in nature and is undertaken by small, agile teams, this type of organizational model can be slow to respond and innovate. Companies that take the approach of empowering autonomous teams must find ways to ensure that coordination and connectivity happen among those teams without relying on controlling managers. Again, it’s a matter of managerial art as well as science to achieve alignment without excessive control.
Our favorite example illustrating how to approach these three challenges is the Swedish company Spotify. Spotify is a 10-year-old music, video, and podcast streaming company with 30 million paying subscribers and about $3 billion in revenue. Its more than 2,000 employees are organized into agile teams, called squads, which are self-organizing, cross-functional, and colocated. Spotify has largely succeeded in maintaining an agile mindset and principles without sacrificing accountability. It enables innovation while keeping the benefits of repeatability, and it creates alignment without excessive control. Its lessons apply to many companies, not just digitally enabled service providers. Here’s how.
Spotify’s core organizational unit is an autonomous squad of no more than eight people. Each squad is accountable for a discrete aspect of the product, which it owns cradle to grave. Squads have the authority to decide what to build, how to build it, and with whom to work to make the product interoperable. They are organized into a light matrix called a tribe. Tribes comprise several squads linked together through a chapter, which is a horizontal grouping that helps to support specific competencies such as quality assistance, agile coaching, and web development. The chapter’s primary role is to facilitate learning and competency development throughout the squads.
Leadership within the squad is self-determined, while the chapter leader is a formal manager who focuses on coaching and mentoring. Spotify believes in the player-coach model: Chapter leaders are also squad members. Squad members can switch squads and retain the same formal leader within their chapter. Spotify introduced a third organizational element, known as a guild. Guilds are lightweight communities of interest whose primary purpose is to share knowledge in areas that cut across chapters and squads, such as leadership, continuous delivery, and web delivery.
This unusual combination of squads, tribes, chapters, and guilds is the organizational infrastructure that underlies Spotify’s operating model. At first reading, it might sound like just another way to define a conventional organizational matrix in Millennial- and digital-friendly terms. But a closer examination reveals just how different the model really is and why it seems to work so well.
The squad structure achieves autonomy without sacrificing accountability. Every squad owns its features throughout the product’s life cycle, and the squads have full visibility into their features’ successes and failures. There is no single appointed leader of a squad; any such leadership role is emergent and informal. Results are visible both through internal reviews and through customer feedback, and squads are expected to fully understand successes and failures. Squads go through postmortem analyses of failures to ensure learning, and some squad rooms have “fail walls.” Every few weeks, squads conduct retrospectives to evaluate what is going well and what needs to improve.
To ensure that the feedback process is effective for individuals as well as for the squads, Spotify redesigned its performance management system to separate salary discussion and performance evaluations from coaching and feedback. Before, peer feedback was incorporated into salary reviews; in Spotify’s words, that “incentivized people to gather as many favorable reviews as possible rather than getting feedback around their biggest areas of potential improvement.” Now, colleagues use an internal tool to invite anyone — including managers, peers, and direct reports — to provide feedback on results and on what an individual can do to improve. Employees may solicit feedback as often as they choose. Spotify employee Jonas Aman told us, “The result is a process that everyone needs to own and drive themselves — it is about development and personal growth.”
Adapted from
Time, Talent, Energy: Overcome Organizational Drag and Unleash Your Team’s Productive Power
Strategic PlanningBOOK- Michael Mankins
- Eric Garton
Spotify encourages innovation without losing the benefits of repeatability. Since squads are the primary centers of innovation, Spotify introduced its chapters as the matrix to connect competencies across squads. Chapters in some ways are like a function-led center of expertise in a traditional model, which links center-led functions with business units. In Spotify’s case, chapters have less formal authority, and they are organized around discrete competencies as opposed to broad functions. Guilds were added to facilitate experience sharing for horizontal topics of interest that are at a higher level than a specific competency. In the traditional model, central functions define and enforce standards and routinized processes from the top down. At Spotify, best-practice methods are discovered over time and determined by popular adoption from the bottom up. A practice or tool becomes a standard only when enough squads have adopted it to make it a de facto standard.
Culture plays a big role in keeping the innovation engine firing on all cylinders. Spotify has an experiment-friendly culture with an emphasis on test-and-learn approaches and contained experiments. If people don’t know the best way to do something, they are likely to try alternative approaches and run several A/B tests to determine which is preferable. In place of opinion, ego, and authority, Spotify works hard to substitute data, experimentation, and open dialogue about root causes. It lowers the cost of failure through a decoupled architecture, so that a failure has a “limited blast radius” and affects only part of the user experience.
Spotify fosters alignment without excessive control. The central organizational feature that shapes Spotify’s model is the concept of “loosely coupled, tightly aligned squads.” The key belief here is that “alignment enables autonomy — the greater the alignment, the more autonomy you can grant.” That’s why the company spends so much time aligning on objectives and goals before launching into work. The leadership model at Spotify reinforces this alignment. A leader’s job is to figure out the right problem and communicate it, so that squads can collaborate to find the best solution. Coordination comes through context and through a deep understanding of the company’s priorities, product strategies, and overall mission. The release process decouples each element for feature squads, infrastructure squads, and client application squads. The ability to release features and then toggle them on or off enables full releases even before all features are fully operational. Here, too, the culture acts as a support. The watchword at Spotify is “be autonomous, but don’t suboptimize — be a good citizen in the Spotify ecosystem.” A common analogy at the company is a jazz band: Each squad plays its instrument, but each also listens to the others and focuses on the overall piece to make great music.
Clearly, not all of Spotify’s choices will be appropriate for every company; that’s not the point. Rather, the point is that a company must make explicit choices in its operating model, ways of working, and culture that address the three core tensions between individual autonomy and organizational goals. Systematically aligning all elements of your operating model and working environment to create autonomy without sacrificing accountability, to get innovation where it matters most without sacrificing the benefits of scalability and repeatability, and to get alignment without excessive control are all at the heart of building an engaging and inspiring working environment.
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Adapted from the Harvard Business Review Press bookTime, Talent, Energy: Overcome Organizational Drag and Release Your Team’s Productive Power.