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Quick guide: iTunes Radio vs. Pandora vs. Spotify vs. Rdio vs. Google Play Music

Click through our list of five music streaming sites to see what Apple's new iTunes radio has to live up to. 

3. Pandora

Reuters/Brendan McDermid
Traders work at the kiosk where Pandora internet radio is traded on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Pandora Media Inc has witnessed an increase in revenue from mobile advertising and new subscribers.

Pandora promises to "play only music you'll love," and that they do. Using information from its Music Genome Project – Pandora's own, continually updated music database. Simply sign up for a free account (no credit card information required), enter your favorite artist or song, and start listening to a station that features songs Pandora thinks you're likely to enjoy. You can give songs a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" and "skip" songs you don't like. Pandora then stores all of this information to fine tune your listening experience with capacity for up to 100 unique stations.

Cost: Pandora is free, but if you want to listen without adverts, get Pandora One for $3.99 per month, or $36 per year.

Sharing: Pandora allows you to share songs and stations on Facebook and Twitter. 

Limits: With the free Pandora account, you can only listen to 40 hours of music a week, a limit that applies both the smart phone app and web streaming. Plus, Pandora only has access to 1 million songs, versus over the 20 million that are offered by Spotify and others.    

Devices: Accessible on PC and Mac via pandora.com. For mobile devices, you have to download the Pandora app.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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