Tech Wars - Music Streaming Services

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Welcome to Tech Wars! Every Tuesday and Thursday we take two or more tech services/products and put them side-by-side to see which one prevails. Follow us on Twitter (@allstuffnerdy) to get updates when a new Tech War comes out. To see more Tech Wars articles, click the "Tech Wars" link at the top of the page.

We all like streaming music. Music keeps us productive when we are working. But we can be quite opinionated on which one we think is the best, so we stacked up three of the top streaming music services to find out which one comes out on top.

Today we have the following up for comparison:

	Pandora	Grooveshark	Spotify
Created	January 2000	2007	2006
Total users	25 million	20 million	40 million
Services	Free and Paid	Free and Paid	Free and Paid
Access with free service	Unlimited listening with limited skips and occasional audio and visual ads	Unlimited listening with visual ads	Limited selection of music with limit of 10 hours of listening a month with audio and visual ads
Features of paid service	No ads and unlimited skips	No ads and features such as crossfade and access to the desktop app along with offline playback	Unlimited ad-free listening with mobile and desktop app access and offline playback
Cost of paid service	$4.99/month	$9/month	$9.99/month
Music selection method	Radio	Radio and manual	Radio and manual(only for Premium)
Song catalog size	800,000+ (2011)	15 million	20 million
Platforms	Web and most mobile devices	Web, PC, Mac, and Android (other mobile users can use online HTML5 interface)	Web, PC, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, and Windows Phone

All stacked up, let's compare them. Starting at the top we see that both Grooveshark and Spotify are relatively new players in the game. Pandora and Grooveshark hover around the 20 millions mark while Spotify is up there at 40 million. Grooveshark places almost no restrictions on free users. Pandora limits the skipping ability (which also applies to paid accounts, but with more skips allowed). And Spotify has the harshest of all with severe restrictions on free users with only 10 hours of allotted listening time. For both Pandora and Spotify they both lift their restrictions on paid users while Grooveshark adds features for it's premium members. Pandora has the cheapest paid plan with $4.99 a month while the other two sit around the $9 mark. Pandora is the only streaming service on this list to not offer on demand listening while the others make it their main feature. While Pandora seems a little bit behind in song catalog size, Spotify takes the lead with 20 million songs and with Grooveshark just around 5 million behind. And while Pandora supports the majority of devices, Grooveshark supports pretty much all modern devices with it's Flash-based website and HTML5 site for mobile users.

The results:
After looking through the results, the best one would have to be Grooveshark. With almost no restrictions on free users (and no audio ads), combined with universal device support, it has to be AllStuffNerdy's top choice of music streaming client.

So let us know in the comments, do you agree with our pick? Would you have picked something else? Do you think we left out a worthy competitor? Let us know in the comments. And stay tuned every Tuesday and Thursday for more Tech Wars.

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Nvidia shield - Overview

Ever wish you could play your graphic-intensive games on the go? Mobile technology is achieving higher clock speeds at a rapid pace, but it is nowhere near as fast as desktop computing hardware. Not to mention that they lack the room to allow for proper cooling. Nvidia has found a potential solution. They created the Nvidia Shield.

For those not familiar with the company, Nvidia is a large graphics card manufacturer that owns about 62% (tekrevue) of the GPU market. Not to mention that Nvidia has created some of the fastest GPUs ever made. So they already have a large base of gamers to test with. They took note of how lots of people use their mobile devices for games (usually not hardcore 3D gaming, but gaming in general). So they created a device that could play top-of-the-line games with bottom-line hardware. The whole system relies on the user owning a computer that has a supported Nvidia GPU (most Nvidia GPUs made in the last two years should be fine). Then using the Shield, they can pick any game from their library. The game will launch on their computer and the computer will stream the screen to the Shield. The Shield will also send back key presses to the computer to interact with the game. Essentially, it's just a fancy way to remote-control your computer playing a video game. The Shield supports sending 60 FPS @ 1080p over either Wi-Fi or Ethernet (Ethernet is faster). Recently Nvidia has announced that it will be supporting streaming over the internet, so you are no longer tethered to your home network. The Nvidia Shield itself runs Android on a 1.9 GHz quad core ARM processor called the Tegra (which is also manufactured by Nvidia). It has 2 GB of RAM and a 1280x720 IPS Retina display. The Retina part of it means that it has more pixels per inch than the human eye can tell apart, so the images look more realistic. It was released at $299 USD but has since dropped down to $199 USD. Overall it seems like a reasonable device, but the price tag of the Shield and a compatible Nvidia GPU is overkill. But if you like to play your games almost every waking moment of your life, it may be worth considering. Recently a lot of competitors have released their own version of Nvidia's streaming service (read my article on the Steam streaming service here).

3 reasons you should get it:
1)You can stream your games to play on the go.
2) You will soon be able to stream your games from anywhere in the world.
3)It runs android, so it can function like a normal Android tablet (without calling or SMS)

3 reasons you should not get it:
1)It carries a heavy price tag
2)It requires a fast computer and internet connection to function properly
3)Most people don't have a use for this. They like their giant screen that they play games on.

So ahead and leave a comment below, what would you use the Nvidia Shield for?

Sources:
http://www.tekrevue.com/nvidia-takes-62-of-discrete-gpu-market-share-in-q2-2013/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Shield

Hey blog readers! If you want to follow our meaningless updates, check out our pages here:
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Joshua: http://fiverr.com/armmaster17
Brandon: http://fiverr.com/maltzy
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Check out our SpreadShirt shop for our awesome selection of geeky apparel. We offer Mens, Womens, and kid sizes of T-shirts, Long-sleeve shirts, and hoodies in addition to coffee mugs and more. Check out our store here: http://allstuffnerdy.spreadshirt.com