Music has gone through a turbulent transitional period in recent years. More specifically, the way users interact with music has significantly changed. While gone are the days in which the only way to get new music was to head down to your local music shop, now the ability to access music is available through a variety of different avenues. Not to mention, each of these avenues also offer a variety of different offerings. One of the most popular means at present is the idea of subscription based streaming. A Netflix approach to music, where users can pay a small fee and in return have unlimited access to a very large catalogue of music.
However, whether you find subscription based services to be value-for-money will be highly dependent on how you listen to music. Based on the current offerings, the what seems to be averaging of subscription services has resulted in a now standard $9.99 fee per month. This seems to be the happy medium that (some) users are willing to pay and music labels, artist and so on are happy to accept a share from. From the consumer perspective, this means an unlimited variety of music all for the cost of what used to be the cost of one album purchase a month.
That said, if you were not really in the habit of buying an album every month or only listen to a select number of artists then $9.99 might seem a little high. Well, a new service has finally changed on android which looks to significantly undercut those offered from Google, Spotify and the very recently reported Tidal. In contrast to these offerings, Rithm offers music streaming for as little as $3.99. However, this is not a straight up service like those from Google, Spotify and Tidal but instead offering more of a social based approach. Users share their music with each other through the app which generates a large portion of the library. As such, the app also offers a messaging ability as well where users can interact with each other as well as sharing the music. In spite of the highly social element, Rithm are reported to also be working with a number of artists and labels to increase the size of their library. If this sounds like something you might be interred in then the app is available to download now from the Play Store and offers a free 14 day trial. Alternatively, you can check out the video below to get a better idea of how the concept works.