With the impending January 21st release of the subscription only Beats Music, I'm thinking two things: 1: why on earth do we need another music streaming service and 2: with Spotify announcing unlimited ad-supported service just yesterday, why would I want to pay $9.99 a month?¹ I'll admit, I do like Beats Music "Madlibs" type playlist creation and the interface does looks pretty slick. Since they have a free trial I'll give them a shot. As a small bonus, apparently because I'm an AT&T wireless subscriber, I have the opportunity to get 90 days free on the family plan! After that, it's $14.99 a month and I already know that I'm 90% NOT going to pay. I'm all about equal opportunity and trying out new services, but both the free Pandora or Spotify options don't have me wanting to spend money.

Unrelated, my wife and I are REALLY contemplating unplugging our television services later this year. Time to hunker down right and spend money wisely. Too bad turntable.fm didn't last and what the heck HBO? Why can't you detach yourself from a cable subscription already?!

In our experience it’s always been a living, breathing human who has brought us that song we fell in love with. The song you couldn’t stop playing over and over. The album you deemed a headphone masterpiece. The mix tape that made you think “I’m gonna marry this one.” We tried to remember a time a robot found us magic but all we could find were the times the robot made us laugh: “You like Pantera? Have you heard of Black Sabbath?” “You like Mumford and Sons? Here’s another song with banjos!”

We wanted to build a service that was more than a server, one that was truly of service to the listener. We wanted to combine the trust that comes from excellent hand-picked music with the personalization that knows you’re an individual and that a handful of stations can’t satisfy all listeners.

If you want to be transported somewhere else, try RIGHT NOW. Just tell Beats Music where you are, what you feel like doing, who you’re with, and what kind of music you’re looking to hear and we’ll take care of the rest by delivering you an endless playlist for your context, be it real or imaginary.

As of this writing, the following are numbers of 'Likes' from their Facebook Page: 6.3 million for Pandora, 4 million for Spotify and 92k for Beats Music. I guess that's good for a service that hasn't launched yet.

Pandora One cost $36 a year or $3.99 a month; Spotify costs a similar $9.99 a month. ↩