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99 Degrees (2021) …  energy and passion …

Beats Music, a new streaming service backed by Dr. Dre’s brand, is exploding on the music scene.

With a slick user interface, a Super Bowl ad featuring Ellen DeGeneres, and the backing of the good doctor’s name, Beats Music aims to take on Spotify, the juggernaut of the streaming world.

Launched on Jan. 21, Beats Music was plagued by severe issues almost immediately. Many users couldn’t connect, and the ones that could (myself included) were having issues actually playing music.

Despite this, I am impressed by Beats Music. Setting up the app on my Android phone was a breeze. There are several screens that allow users to choose what bands and genres they like and dislike using a pretty but somewhat unintuitive interface.

Upon finishing the setup, users are presented with a home screen that has playlists customized for their tastes. This feature didn’t work so well for me, but I have fairly uncommon musical tastes, and running the setup again using more mainstream choices yielded much better results

Another way Beats Music allows for a customized experience is “the sentence.” This feature allows users to choose from a set of common situations, and creates a playlist just for the situation.  Users can’t actually write the sentence, just choose from a list of modifiers. For example, “I’m on a boat and feel like dancing with my mom to metal” works.

But users can’t be “On Air Force One and feel like playing chess with Vladimir Putin to electro house.”  Even so, the feature is still very cool.

As far as sound quality goes, both Beats Music and Spotify stream high quality 320kbps mp3 on mobile (when the high quality streaming is on). Both sounded very clear through my Grado SR80i headphones coming from my Samsung Galaxy S3, although other users’ experiences may vary depending on what type of source and what type of headphones are being used.

Where Beats Music really loses out is on the computer. Unlike Spotify, Beats Music does not have a desktop application. Through my setup (Schitt Modi to Schitt Vali to Beyerdynamic DT990 pro), Beats Music had a noticeably more distant and thin sound when compared to Spotify.

Both Spotify and Beats cost $10 a month, but Beats doesn’t have a free desktop app or a $5 “lower tier” price point which is similar to the premium version.  Beats also doesn’t have high quality playback or offline content like Spotify.

But AT&T customers are eligible for an extended three-month free trial, as well as a $15 per month family plan, which allows for five users on 10 different devices.

Beats Music does offer some unique and interesting features, and it’s an excellent choice if users do most of their music-listening on the go.

But for those users who do a lot of listening at a computer or are already subscribed to a service like Spotify, Beats does not present any compelling reasons to switch.