iTunes Alternative Saves Cash

iTunes dominates the digital-music downloading market right now, with millions of people throwing literally billions of dollars at Apple every year in exchange for music files.

While a sigle download may not put you in much a financial pinch, week after week and month after month of regularly updating your music library can add up.

Of course, there are alternatives to handing over your allowance or babysitting dough to Apple. You can watch all the music videos you want on YouTube, if you don’t mind navigating the aggravating interface. You can listen on Grooveshark, though it’s plagued by ads and mis-labelled tracks.

Thankfully, there is an even better solution to your tech tune habit.

If you like music, you have surely heard of Spotify. And if you like music, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be using it.

“But what about all my music on iTunes?” you ask. Don’t worry, you can access all of that from Spotify’s well-designed and aesthetically-pleasing app. And as new music goes, the main advantage of Spotify is that it’s completely free. Forever, if you so choose, though I recommend going “premium.”

You can listen to almost any song you wish in exchange for listening to a 15-second advertisement between every 5 songs or so. You can add them to playlists, add albums to your library, all without any monetary expense.

Spotify does try to entice you into purchasing a Premium account.

The free version of the mobile app can only play songs in shuffle mode- a condition removed when you upgrade to Premium. In addition, Premium allows you to download your music. That way, you don’t use up data listing to music.

I also recently discovered that upgrading to Premium allows you to listen to music at higher quality. For the audiophiles out there, if you plug in a reasonably nice set of headphones with high-quality turned on, the improvement in quality is evident.

Premium runs $9.99 a month. This may seem like a lot, but you’re able to listen to all the new songs you want in high quality with no distractions. On iTunes, every song sells for between $0.69 and $1.29. This only allows you to listen to between 8 and 14 new songs on iTunes for the cost of one month of infinite high-quality music on Spotify. Clearly, the latter is the better deal.

Overall, Spotify offers two enticing deals. For the casual listener, there’s the free version–listen to as much as you want with no cost. And for the music die-hard, there’s Premium–the ultimate in music-streaming software.

People continue to use iTunes, wasting their money on an inferior product just because it has the Apple logo. This article should be your  wake-up call. Save your money. Use Spotify.