Music streaming services are a wonder of the internet and mobile technology, giving you instant access to millions and millions of songs by paying a monthly fee that won’t hurt your bank account. While on Wi-Fi at home, it works perfectly fine. However, when you go out of Wi-Fi coverage, listening to Spotify or Pandora using your mobile connection will certainly deplete your monthly data allowance quickly. This is because music streaming uses a lot of data. About a year ago, T-Mobile USA has introduced their free music streaming service that allows you to listen to all the music you want on selected services without consuming your mobile data. If you don’t like contracts and prefer a pre-paid plan, Virgin Mobile USA has just announced a similar offering where you will be able to listen to music for free.
For the moment, only iHeartRadio, Pandora and Slacker Radio are included, so, if on Spotify, no fun for you. Additionally, they have ramped up their data plans. For $35 a month, instead of getting the insignificant 250 MB offering, you will have 1 GB of high-speed 3G/4G connection. $45 a month will give you 3 GB instead of the old 1 GB, and for monthly $55, you get 8 GB, way better than the previous 3 GB for the same price. All the plans will give you unlimited talk and text. Additionally, if you need more data, it’s possible to add a further 1 GB for $5 or 2 GB for $10. If you don’t like mobile data, there’s a talk & text only option for $25 a month, with Wi-Fi access included, offering 500 minutes of talk and unlimited texting.
Unlimited music streaming is a great deal since this type of service is becoming more and more important. However, the fact that Virgin Mobile doesn’t offer support for Spotify is unfortunate, especially since the service has over 70 million active users, and a lot of them are in the U.S. T-Mobile offers support for a lot more services, including Google Play Music and Soundcloud. Still, the prices are interesting and you can head out to the source link in order to check out all details. The new offerings will be available from this Friday, October 9th.