Of all the music services I have Songza is favorite.  They have in my opinion the best selection and most tailored genre playlists.  Every time I go to listen to music they have the ability to get me more closely to what I am looking for than the other lists.  For example, the other I was looking for something lively as we were headed to the Eric Church concert here in Tampa.  So I went to Songza, Genre, Country and here's a sampling of what was available:

Country's Biggest Hits

Today's Rowdy Country Hits

Upbeat Country Hits

Happy Hour Country

and another 20 more.

I didn't want anything slow so I chose Upbeat Country Hits. I had at first tried slacker but was getting too much slow stuff. I didn't want slow, I wanted happy. Happy to be away from work for the moment, happy I could sleep in the next day.

Today I wanted something different to relax to in the AM at work. I scanned Songza,Rock and saw some interesting choices. At first I selected "Let the Good Times Roll" a hat tip to the song off the Cars first and self-titled album from the late 70's early 80's. It was playing a lot of cool songs I recall hearing on the radio in High School.

That wasn't exactly what I was looking for so next I chose "A Road Trip Through Canada". I was expecting to hear stuff from bands like April Wine, Loverboy, Heart and Triumph but instead got this weird rock/jazz light background music that I thought was so cool I decided to write this blog. I heard stuff from Prince, Thelonious Monk, Alanis Morissette, The Birds of Tokyo and Fall Out Boy as the playlist meandered on through a laid back but very interesting musical journey.

Music is a funny thing, it seems when you least expect it, it throws something at you that maybe you never heard but it moves you. It opens you up to new musical experiences you enjoy. I never, ever listen to radio. I can't stand it. I hate the talking during a song. I hate the way they cut off the end of the song at possibly the best part (guitar solo) to go to some announcement. I hate hearing the same song over and over again. I hate hearing songs that suck.

With streaming, you don't get those things, other than repeating. All of the music services have their pros and cons. Pandora is easy and inexpensive and has its place. Listen for aver a few hours though and you are going to hear the same songs over and over again. The new Tidal service offers High Resolution streaming with much better sounding music. However the genre based playlists need a lot of work and the content seems very limited so far. It's also fairly expensive at $19.95 a month. Slacker is a good option but again listen too long and you hear a lot of the same songs. Slacker does have a better genre based playlists than most other services. Slacker is also relatively inexpensive with packages from $3.99 or $9.99. Rhapsody is unique in that it is more of an album or song based service. As opposed to Pandora where they play similar music, Rhapsody will go to the exact song you want to hear. I am not a fan of Rhapsody radio and prefer any of the other services I mention for variety. I didn't mention Spotify because although their phone app is decent, using it with a Sonos player is a horrible experience and is not in any way similar to what you get by playing from your phone. 'll get a lot more variety. You can usually try the service for free. If you don't like a service you can cancel at any time, so there is no real danger of trying something to see what fits your listening habits best.

So, there are all kinds of options out there. I just keep finding over and over again that Songza gives me the most variety of "good music". Since it seems Songza is not really ever listed as one of the "main" services, I thought it deserved a mention. It's great, it's free (for now anyway), it's awesome. If I had one thing I would change it would be the ability to stream FLAC or high resolution files.