Sky Songs

Posted on 2 Sep 2010 at 15:53

Sky’s MP3 service offers a mix of iTunes-style downloads and Spotify-style streaming, advert-free for a reasonable £4.99 monthly charge.

Unlike Spotify or we7, there’s no free, ad-supported service.

Sky Songs is clearly aimed at a mainstream audience. If you want to explore a range of music and see recommendations from people who sound like they have a passion for a particular genre, then iTunes, 7digital and Amazon do it better.

A few tracks refused to play in the browser, and on other occasions the Back button wouldn’t work

If you want playlists consisting of Westlife’s favourite Westlife tracks or want to find out what they like to listen to on tour, then Sky Songs is right up your street.

With around five million tracks on offer, Sky Songs can’t compete with Spotify or iTunes for breadth of catalogue. While you’ll find most major jazz or folk artists or classical composers, there’s only a slim selection of tracks or albums on offer.

On the plus side, rock, pop and electronic music are well covered, and the 192Kbits/sec MP3 streams sound slightly better than Spotify’s 128Kbits/sec Ogg Vorbis. Albums, most in 320Kbits/sec MP3 format, are quick to download, and your £5 fee includes five free downloads per month.

Sky Songs installs its own software client for downloading tracks and albums, and while this will download tracks, retry stalled downloads and add the tracks to iTunes or Windows Media Player, it takes a hefty 45MB of RAM to do so.

Plus, while Sky wins points for offering a locker service where you can re-download tracks you’ve already downloaded, you’re only allowed to do so once before calling customer services.

Finally, we found that loading albums from the catalogue was painfully slow at times both in Internet Explorer and Chrome. A few tracks refused to play in the browser, and on other occasions the Back button wouldn’t work.

Overall, Sky’s prices are slightly lower than average, but we’d stick with we7 and Spotify for streaming, and Amazon or Tesco for downloads.