PORTLAND, Maine — Anyone who’s lived through the eras of vinyl, cassette tapes, CDs, iPods and streaming can tell you, with the wisdom that comes from experience, that it can be both expensive and annoying to rebuild your music library every time technology changes. But unless you want to pull out your boom box and put in a cassette, you don’t have a lot of options. You either keep up with the times or get left behind.
Right now, we live in the age of streaming music. The most popular services--Pandora, Spotify and Apple music—serve untold millions of people. But what if you want to try another service, one that offers something different, maybe something that’s less expensive and more user-friendly? Where do you turn?
We turned to our personal tech guy, Rich Brooks of Flyte New Media in Portland. He took a dive into the world of streaming music to find what services besides the Big Three are out there, what they do, and whether they’re worth your time and money. Check out our conversation to see what Rich discovered and whether some of those others options will work for you.