3 best smartphone apps to find new music

Music discovery is often a young person’s game, there’s no doubt about it. Who else but a kid in high school with all the time in the world after 2:30 PM has the energy available to scour the Internet for hot new bands? Not me. But thankfully, there are plenty of apps that do the searching for you these days, and even more devices are starting to support these apps in new and interesting ways.

Long gone are the days of playing your personal MP3 collection on WinAmp with no social component. Now there are so many options it’s easy to lose track. A favorite of several friends of mine is the Rdio app. Rdio is a music discovery app that lets you stream unlimited music via your iphone, iPad or iPod touch. Users can follow tastemakers and other artists to see what they’re listening to and discover music in a very organic, social way. Rdio costs $14.99 a month to use but you can defer some of that cost by getting 1 percent cash back on your purchase.

For an app with a little more radio component and less searching, there’s Pandora, the internet radio app that plays music similar to specific artists or genres of your choosing. While users can check out Pandora on their phones, there are also less mobile options to listen to Pandora, like a digital audio radio from Walmart. Users will save 2 percent cash back from Walmart and be able to listen to their internet radio in their home without burning out their cell phone’s batteries.

Finally there’s my favorite music discovery app, Spotify. Spotify lets you stream music from a number of devices for $9.99 a month and also includes the artist radio features that Pandora is famous for. It’s a truly remarkable music discovery service and it’s slowly becoming available in a number of stereo receivers including a line from Onkyo that I absolutely love. And of course with Best Buy you’ll get 2 percent cash back on your purchase.

Music discovery doesn’t have to be a pain anymore. Thanks to a handful of really excellent internet radio enabled apps, music discovery is as easy as telling an app what your favorite band is and letting the tunes roll in. Welcome to the future.

—By Dan Kricke, Appolicious