As I mentioned in March, the otherwise-great Rdio isn't too good at music discovery. So, as a Canadian citizen, what can I use to stream music from the Internet for free on my iPhone? Apart from streaming (crappy) commercial radio stations, that is? Spotify? Nope. Spotify? Nada. MOG? Ha! So this week, I'll try to find whatever services are available in Canada, and test one of them each day. The service has to be free and work from my iPhone.
CBC Music
Yay for your tax dollars! While CBC Music is a geographically restricted set of MP3 radio stations, it is varied enough to be considered a streaming music service. It offers roughly 40 stations, with only a few non-commercial interruptions.
The app is basic, and quite frankly I tend to listen to those streams using TuneIn Radio with a very large buffer, since the streams (especially, or only the classical ones) tend to skip quite a lot otherwise. If it weren't from those skips, the streams are very good. Radio 3 is amazing, and the 10 channels for classical music alone are great. True, the music selection has a clear Canadian bias, and this is not a "latest hits" radio, but then the music selection has an incredible breadth and quality. And, dare I say it, those channels usually are of higher quality than most commercial radio stations.
So, for once something on the Internet on you can't get outside of Canada, and is very good to boot.
Published on August 13, 2012 at 20:30 EDT
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