At Pulse, we listen to a lot of music throughout the day. Most of it comes from Pandora. The ability to pick great Pandora radio stations was actually one of the requirements of working at Pulse that caught my eye when I applied. We're always looking for new office DJs. Especially ones with iOS, Android and Web skills. ;)

Streaming radio is great for music discovery, but what if I want to play songs I own/know? Normally, you'd fire up [insert mp3 app] and listen to your collection, while when away from the computer you're limited to the songs you synchronized to your device. 

I personally feel like local storage is a thing of the past. We now have cheap cloud storage with redundancy and fast mobile communication technologies(3G/4G). I haven't seen the point of storing my music locally for a while, let alone plugging my device to sync new tracks. Companies are claiming the we're entering a Post-PC era, but that's certainly not the case until you lose the USB cable. Let's face it, they're giants trying to please the record industry who care most about their bottom line. There's more money to be made by selling individual track/albums and upselling storage on machines and devices. 

Despite the licensing challenges with the record companies, there are a number of streaming music services that are great alternatives to the iTunes monopoly. I will discuss some of the services that I've used and their pros and cons. There are clearly some services that I've left out, but they should resemble the ones discussed. Let me know if you feel they're important and I'll make sure to check them out.