There are many legal ways to get music on the internet whether it's by purchasing and downloading individual songs and albums or to have unlimited streaming of music for a monthly fee. Personally I prefer the latter. I'd rather have access to millions of songs instead of limiting myself to just downloading songs I think I want. The unlimited streaming option has opened up my music experience by discovering new music or rediscovering old music I used to listen to.

While there are many streaming services (Spotify, Rdio, Google Music, etc - Apple still hasn't released a streaming service.) the one I always felt was the most under rated is Microsoft's Xbox Music Pass. Contrary to it's name you do not need to have an Xbox to subscribe to Xbox Music. In fact Xbox music will work on any device - PC, Mac, iPhone/iPad, Android phones and, of course, an Xbox console. For $10 a month or $100 a year you get access to millions of songs that you can stream or even download to your mobile device. Quite often before a long road trip I'll create a playlist on my phone and then download all the tracks so I'm not sucking up valuable mobile bandwidth on the road.

Just yesterday Xbox released a new feature where you can sync your entire music catalog (up to 50,000 tracks) to Microsoft's OneDrive which will then sync with Xbox Music. This is regardless of whether you have a subscription or not. If you already have a subscription you can fill some holes that may exist in the Xbox Music catalog (ie. The Beatles). For those of you who may already have an extensive catalog or don't want to shell out the monthly fee this new service now means you can upload all your songs to your OneDrive Music folder and you will have access to your collection from every device you have. For those of you who don't already know, OneDrive is Microsoft's free online storage service (check out my previous blog post here for more details). OneDrive normally has 15GB free, but when you get Music Pass that is increased by 100GB for free. For more details you can visit the Microsoft Page on this.

I have subscribed to Xbox Music for years and use it almost everyday. It's an under rated service you should check out.