Has
this ever happened to you? You’re in a mall or restaurant and suddenly
you hear a song that’s so catchy that you immediately want to know what
it is, who sings it, how you can get it. (By the way, this experience
never happens in an elevator). Of course today, there are a few apps
like Shazam that enable you to get song identification in a few seconds.
But what then? How do you listen to the track again or (gasp) purchase
it?
Well, now there’s a new app for Android users (put yo hands up for us ‘droiders!) that makes this as easy as possible.
The digital music service Rhapsody has just introduced Rhapsody SongMatch
and if you’re thinking this will be a formidable rival to the extremely
popular song matching services Shazam and Soundhound, well, then, you
would be correct.
Like the other services, SongMatch is a free app that
lets you identify songs, but how you proceed from there is quite
different. For Rhapsody subscribers (two week free trial, then 10 bucks a
month), you can then listen and download full tracks of the songs you
suddenly love, or even get albums, artists catalogs or discover artists
with a similar sound.
One nice added perk is that the matched songs are
automatically stored in a playlist so that you can come back and
rediscover the magic on any of your devices. If you don’t want to
subscribe to Rhapsody, the SongMatch app is still available and still
free so you can identify the songs that will give you a wicked case of
earworm later, but the playback is disabled.
And just to let you
know, I compared the SongMatch and Shazam apps and more than
once, the SongMatch was able to identify a song while the Shazam responded,
“Not enough information.” And one was a Bruce Springsteen song that my 7-year old could have identified. Who’s the Boss now? –Shari
Get the Rhapsody SongMatch app in the Google Play Android Store.
