After some initial bumps in the launch road where their application was unavailable for a little while, Beats Music appears to be back to accepting new members. The initial free trial period is 7 days though AT&T customers can obtain a 30 day or 3 month trial at no cost provided the fee is billed to your AT&T account.
Access to Beats Music includes over 20 million songs and unlimited downloads and streaming (for so long as you remain a subscriber).
The AT&T plans :
Individual – 1 users / 3 devices – $ 9.99/mo
Family – 5 users / 10 devices – $14.99
How Does Beats Compare?
The most similar music service that I’ve used is Pandora which like Beats Music claims that it learns your musical likes and dislikes so it can present you with the most appropriate music without you having to search around for various artists. The annual fee for Pandora is $36 vs $9.99/mo (AT&T) for Beats Music.
I’ve only just started listening to Beats Music, and I am starting to find that it’s actually more of a mix between full feature music apps such as Spotify ($9.99/mo) combined with Pandora’s “we learn your musical likes”.
The application is a bit crashy on my Samsung Galaxy Note 3, and I’ll have to take the full 7 days to see how insightful the music recommendations are.
So far in my initial experience the Beats Music application has solved two complaints I’ve had with other music apps.
- Many times I just want the app to pick music for me
- Other times I want to select a playlist and listen to music someone else has picked (curated)
Beats Music allows for both of these and initially the interface is very simple to navigate (another pet peeve I’ve had with other music applications such as XBox Music which seem to hide simple options in the far corners of the app). As of now I’m not sure whether I’ll subscribe. I also have a subscription to Pandora, Google Music , Spotify and XBox Music with each being used by a different member of my household. Perhaps Beats Music will be the application that finally lets me consolidate my music subscriptions.