Samsung Milks the Streaming Market

By Carolyn Heneghan

Yes, we have yet another streaming music service infiltrating the online listening landscape. Will this one be any different, and will if offer new features that the other services haven’t already?

Samsung set out to specifically “address consumer pain points” with its new music streaming service, Milk Music: a “fresh” take on music. These pain points include a longer and more involved music setup, such as creating usernames and passwords, dealing with too many ads and interruptions, and hearing repetead songs from a a limited catalog.

To assuage these consumer frustrations, Samsung has created a sign-up-free, ad-free music streaming service that has partnered with Slacker Radio (rather than dealing with getting record labels on board) to bring Samsung consumers a viable alternative to other streaming services.

However, like iTunes Radio, Milk Music is exclusively available to Samsung customers, specifically users of Galaxy S-series and Note devices. The service is not currently available on tablets, as Samsung is working on optimizing the mobile phone experience for now. Users can download Milk Music from Google Play, but it’s unknown whether or not the service will eventually come built in to Samsung devices.

So what makes Samsung’s Milk Music comparable to, or even better than its competitors?

Milk Music’s Selection

Through a partnership with Slacker Radio, Milk Music provides access to about 13 million songs on 200 genre stations. Nine of the most popular stations will be made immediately available on the Milk Music wheel, but you can change them to any of the 15 options available. These stations include Spotlight, which appears on the dial at all times, and is curated via the Slacker partnership to bring listeners “what’s trending” and Milk-exclusive content, such as first listens of new albums. They also include My Stations, which is based on the stations you’ve created yourself. You can also tap the circle next to a station to scroll through a list of sub-stations to create a still more personalized experience.

Similar to other existing music services, you can create a customized playlist based on a genre, artist, or song, and the service will pull up similar tracks to match your taste. To customize these further, you can swipe upward from the bottom to reveal additional personalization features that determine which songs to play next based on your preferences for (or against) Popular, New, and Favorite songs. That for-or-against selection will be based on the favorites list you’ve created over time, so if you’d rather listen to songs you’ve never heard, you would position the circle on the Favorites bar. You can skip songs 6 times per hour and select “Never Play Song” from the menu, so the song will never come up again in the playlist.

To change stations, you’ll have the experience of a traditional radio tuner as you swipe the dial, or wheel, across the different station selections. One of the most interesting music features is that when you swipe through, you won’t have any lag time, and the songs will start playing right away. This is because Samsung pre-caches each first song in a station by eight seconds so that they are ready as soon as you tune in. When you rotate the dial closer to the center of the circle, the station-changing speed is slower, while rotating from the outer edge makes the stations change at “nitro speed.”

Other Features

Milk Music offers a few other nice features such as play history, which contains the last 500 songs played. As for audio settings, Milk Music offers two audio quality options: Standard (50 kbps) and High (90 kbps).

You can turn the explicit content feature on or off. Also, Milk Music has a location feature, and though the service currently doesn’t do anything specific, Samsung says that it may develop an option for integrating local content into playlists.

You can also choose to forgo the no-sign-in-required feature of Milk Music and hook up Milk Music to your Samsung account to share your Favorites, History,  and stations settings across multiple Samsung devices.

The fact that Samsung is ad-free for now doesn’t mean that it will be ad-free forever, and Samsung is indeed looking into such a business model for the future. As this is probably one of the main reasons why many users out of the 200 million Galaxy owners will download and use the service in the first place, it will be interesting to see where Milk Music ends up as it grows and adapts to the music streaming landscape in the future.

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