Top 3 Music Mobile Apps for Contractors

My pri­ma­ry ser­vice is being a mar­ket­ing man­ag­er and keep­ing ser­vice com­pa­nies account­able with their mar­ket­ing and cus­tomer ser­vice. My sec­ondary ser­vice, which ends up being more of a hob­by, is test­ing out cloud com­put­ing pro­grams and mobile appli­ca­tions for con­trac­tors. Small busi­ness con­trac­tors tend to be on the road a lot these days try­ing to stir up work. Many of them use their time wise­ly by lis­ten­ing to books on tap and pod­cast, which I high­ly rec­om­mend. How­ev­er, if you are like me, I some­times like to use those short trips to do noth­ing pro­duc­tive but lis­ten to good music. So what are the three top music mobile apps that I’ve used? I will list them in order of my top choice to third choice. #1 Groove­shark Groove­shark works pri­mar­i­ly on a Black­ber­ry or Android plat­form. It can work on an iPhone, but the iPhone must be ​“jail­bro­ken.” What does that mean? It is easy to do but com­pli­cat­ed to explain in this blog post. If you real­ly want it on your iPhone, shoot me an email and I’ll tell you how to get it on there: it is free and easy to do. Groove­shark lets you choose what songs you want to lis­ten to. Once you select the song, you can cre­ate your own playlist. It takes a bit more work using Groove­shark because you have to man­u­al put all the songs you’d like togeth­er. I tend to go through phas­es where I lis­ten to 20 or so songs a hun­dred times. So for me, Groove­shark is per­fect. I have a cou­ple of favorite playlist that I play often. Once I get tired of those songs, I cre­ate anoth­er playlist. The only down­side to Groove­shark is the month­ly cost. It is free if you use it on your desk­top com­put­er, but if you want it on your phone, it is about $9 a month. Good app, def­i­nite­ly cheap­er than just buy­ing indi­vid­ual songs from iTunes, if you real­ly like music! #2 Jan­go Jan­go has recent­ly intro­duced their own mobile apps to the Android and iPhone com­mu­ni­ties. I have been wait­ing for this App for about a year. I have not test­ed this App on the Android but use it on my iPhone. Although I like Groove­shark when select­ing indi­vid­ual songs, Jan­go does an excel­lent job help­ing me select a good playlist. How it works: I choose an artist. Jan­go then gives me a list of sim­i­lar artist. I then tell it whether I want to play more or less of those artist. Once I’ve built my desired artist, it will begin play­ing them. I then begin to rate whether I like the song and/​or artist (like Pan­do­ra). If I don’t like a song, it will tell me it won’t ever play it again and will then ask if I want to con­tin­ue play­ing music from that artist. It is pret­ty intel­li­gent, because some­times, I don’t like all the artist on a cer­tain ​“sta­tion” that I cre­at­ed. Jan­go is still new to me, but so far, I real­ly like it. The songs it is play­ing are pret­ty much right to my lik­ing. The good part: it is still free! #3 Pan­do­ra I was a huge fan of Pan­do­ra when it was released. I won­dered who the heck could ever com­pete with this com­pa­ny. I would play Pan­do­ra at my house, com­put­er and car when­ev­er I could. Groove­shark and Jan­go have tru­ly done an awe­some job in my book mov­ing ahead of Pan­do­ra because of the cus­tomiza­tion fea­tures. Pan­do­ra is still a great App, sim­ple and easy to use. The only down­side I’ve expe­ri­enced with it is it is not so cus­tomiz­able. It also tends to play the same songs sev­er­al times in a short times­pan. Do I still use Pan­do­ra? Yes but not as much as the oth­er two apps. My wife still is use to Pan­do­ra and plays it pri­mar­i­ly. That is only because I have not intro­duced her to Jan­go! What do you guys use on the road? Any­thing I’m miss­ing that should be on the list? I’ve yet to try Rhap­sody, though it sounds very sim­i­lar to Groove­shark and is $9.99 a month.