Spotify or Pandora

Bif- To get "redbook" quality stream from Tidal you need to run Google Chrome on your pc and then from Chrome go to Tidal's site and register/pay. interface, search function and library are not as good as Pandora but the SQ is better.

I think that the web-based player only provides redbook quality data stream when used with Chrome.

Think about it, if you could download the music you'd just sign up for a month once year and binge-download. I-tunes is a download service where you pay for each download, Spotify, Pandora and, Tidal are streaming services where you pay for access to content on a monthly basis. You are basically "renting" and get no equity or ability to keep the content.

I've never used Spotify but I agree that Pandora is much better as a radio-like service to just turn on and listen to. I think the SQ of their pay per month service is quite acceptable and I use it pretty regularly.

Interesting, Ghosthouse. So it seems the spotify "playlist" has some kind of DRM that expires in a month, requiring you to maintain your monthly subscription to access them. Seems like a very interesting "hybrid" between the itunes model and the streaming model. Too bad the UI seems to suck! We can only hope that as bandwidth increases over time, it won't make any sense to use lossy compression algorithms to send digital files over the 'net.