I’m part of a “younger” generation who grew up with Napster and downloading MP3s. The iPod came out when I was in high school and downloading music became the future. I too changed with the times and started downloading more of my music and buying less physical CDs. Earlier this year Sony closed down a CD manufacturing plant in southern New Jersey which leaves them with one manufacturing plant left in the U.S. for Sony.

Now as our cell phones get faster and more music streaming services are launched such as Pandora, Spotify, Slacker Radio, I Heart Radio, (some of which you can get for free), I find myself downloading less now. I never though that was possible but you can pretty much have any song on demand with services such as Spotify and play whole albums for a low monthly fee!

I often find myself getting bored with the music that is currently on my phone. Therefore, I jump to services like Pandora and Spotify to just start playing music without having me do anything besides start the app. I know I could simply turn my music on to shuffle, but I still get bored with my music. I’m often discovering new songs and artist on Pandora because when I “thumbs up” a song it’ll find other artists and song similar to that track.

The downfall with Pandora is once you thumbs up a song you can’t go back and play it on demand. This simply lets Pandora know you want to hear that song again in the future and play other songs similar to it. I’m allowed to listen to music while I’m at work, so it’s nice to be able to turn on Pandora quietly and have it find music to play in the background. Pandora is like a radio station, but with much less commercials. You can even pay Pandora $36 a year to get zero commercials.

I have yet to jump to Spotify because it is $5 to $10 a month. I’m sure I will do this in the future, but right now money is tight for me while I attend college, so Pandora satisfies my needs

Android has changed my music experience because I feel that in the next few years I will no longer need the ungodly amount of storage space our phones are being released with. My phone currently has 32GB of storage and I maybe only use about 5GB. Now, if I didn’t use streaming music services then I would still continue to download music at my computer and transfer it to my phone. However, streaming services make life easier because it’s all on demand. I defiantly am spending less time at my computer while working full time, attending college, and having a social life.