HiRes Audio Online’s guide to getting the best deals for your musical entertainment. For most of these deals you will have to provide some form of student verification or access the deal via your student union.
What are the best music streaming deals for students?
The top five contenders for your limited funds are Amazon Music, Apple Music, DEEZER, Spotify and TIDAL.
Amazon Music when combined with an Amazon Prime subscription will also give you video streaming and access to Amazon Prime discounts and next day shopping which together with its 6-month free trial makes it well worth checking out.
Apple Music for those of you who live in the Apple ecosystem with iPhones, iPads and Macs are likely to want to take advantage of their generous student discount and 3-month free trial.
DEEZER is an interesting choice of streaming service with its Flow discovery feature and is well worth investigating.
Spotify is the grand daddy of streaming services and has been the leader of the pack in terms of features and content for most of this decade. A generous student discount and almost ubiquitous device support makes Spotify a sound choice. Spotify have just upgraded their package for US students bundling in Hulu and SHOWTIME. It will be interesting to see if they will repeat this kind of deal in other countries.
TIDAL has a terrific catalogue and if high quality audio is on your list of must haves then this largely artist-owned streamer with its generous discount is definitely a contender.
All of our top choice music streamers offer a free trial period so you have the opportunity to try all of them before committing to any one of them. None of them tie you into a contract so you are able to cancel at any time.
The best of the rest
Budding musicians might well be tempted by a SoundCloud Pro subscription which offers the ability to upload and share music tracks. Napster is still shaking off its chequered file sharing past and whilst not in the Top 5 would certainly not be a poor choice.
Amazingly, given Google’s reputation, the relatively poor audio quality of YouTube Music and the lack of a student discount puts it firmly in the also ran category. Qobuz and the specialist music streamers Idagio and Primephonic don’t have a compelling student package to really make them a consideration. Humbolt is still a very new site and for those with an interest in Indie Music this might make an interesting add-on service to one of the more mainstream streamers. The new kid on the block is Craft Brewed Music which launches on the 1st October 2018 offering ‘a curated streaming service for adventurous listeners who want to discover music which is outside the mainstream’ and an introductory ‘flight’ of ten songs will be available to sample when they launch.
Free music streaming deals
Amazon with its Prime Music, DEEZER Free, SoundCloud Free and SoundCloud Basic, and Spotify Free are all ad-supported music streaming services. The audio quality on all of these is somewhat reduced but may well be ok if you just want something to drown out a noisy commute or the pounding of your heart whilst jogging.
Links to these and other free music sources can be found here.
Amazon Prime Music
Save £40 per year
Prime Music is an ad-free on-demand service offering online access and offline playback to 2 million tracks and is included free with an Amazon Prime account. A Prime Student subscription is available for £3.99 (£39 annual subscription) with a 6-month free trial but for this you also get Prime Video, Unlimited one-day delivery and unlimited photo storage. A full price annual subscription is £79.
Amazon Music Unlimited
Save £36 per year
Amazon Music Unlimited is an ad-free on-demand service offering online access and offline playback to Amazon’s complete catalogue of 40 million tracks including all of its supported devices. Student subscriptions for Prime or non-Prime subscribers is £4.99/month with a 30 day free trial. See Amazon UK’s special offer of a 3 month free trial which runs to the 18th October 2018.
UK students can try Amazon Music Unlimited for 3 months free
Apple Music
Save £60 per year
Apple Music has gained millions of users this year by aggressively marketing its service and is competing with Spotify for top place in the streaming stakes. As might be expected Apple Music plays nicely with iPhones, iPads and Macs but apps are also available for Android and desktop devices. Apple Music is an ad-free on demand service offering online access and offline playback to 45 million tracks (includes 100,000 song download to iTunes library). A student subscription is available for £4.99/month – a saving of £5/month. A 3-month free trial is available.
Who is winning the Spotify v Apple Music wars?
Craft Brewed Music
Craft Brewed Music is a curated streaming service for adventurous listeners who want to discover music which is outside the mainstream and is set to launch on the 1st October 2018. On launch there will be a free ‘flight’ of ten songs to sample what the streamer has to offer. The service is $5/month and there is currently no student discount.
Craft Brewed Music to launch 1st October
DEEZER
Save £60 per year
DEEZER Premium+ is an ad-free on demand service offering online access and offline playback to 53 million tracks in 256kpbs MP3 quality (same as Spotify) and this will cost you £4.99/month for 12 months – renewable three times, £9.99/month thereafter. This represents a saving of £5/month on their normal subscription and there is a 30-day free trial period.
DEEZER HiFi, their CD Quality service comes in at £19.99/month and no discounts are available.
For those on a really tight budget there is DEEZER Free which is a free ad supported streaming service with no offline mode and a reduced streaming quality (128kbps MP3).
Google Play Music
Google Play Music does not offer any student discount and Google has stated that Google Play will eventually be replaced by YouTube Music Premium ‘starting no earlier than 2019’.
Humbolt
Humbolt.rocks is a relatively new Indie Music streaming service providing a platform for independent artists and labels. Subscriptions are $2.99/month and there are currently no student discounts.
Idagio
Idagio is a specialist classical music streamer and does not offer a student discount. Their CD Quality streaming service will cost you €9.99/month.
Napster
Save £60 per year
Napster has come a long way from its peer to peer file sharing days. After being bought out by Rhapsody and amalgamating the two services it now offers an ad-free on-demand service with a catalogue of over 40 million tracks. A student plan is available for UK students at £5/month via your NUS Extra membership and using a promo code.
Primephonic
Primephonic is a specialist classical music streamer and does not offer a student discount. Their CD Quality streaming service will cost you €9.99/month. Their MP3 service will set you back £79.90 per annum and their higher audio quality Platinum subscription starts at £14.99 per month.
Qobuz
Qobuz is a premium music streaming and downloading service offering both CD Quality and HiRes streaming and downloads and does not offer a student discount. Their Premium (MP3) subscription will cost you £99.99/year and £199.99 for a HiFi (CD Quality) service and Sublime (HiRes) starting at £219.99/year,
SoundCloud
With 120 million tracks from established and emerging artists, SoundCloud is one of the go-to places to discover new music. There are two types of subscription – Go Subscriptions for ‘normal’ users who just want to listen to music and Pro Subscriptions which are designed for artists, podcasters, or labels to share music and grow their audience. SoundCloud Go subscriptions start at £5.99/month but SoundCloud Go+ with full access to 30 million premium tracks will set you back £9.99/month.
Budget conscious folks can access a Go subscription with SoundCloud Free which is a free ad supported streaming service with no offline mode and a much reduced streaming quality (64kbps Opus/Ogg Vorbis). There is an equivalent Pro subscription called SoundCloud Basic which is a free, ad supported service with its upload quota reduced to 3 hours.
Spotify
Save £60 per year
Launched in 2008, Spotify has been the leader in the streaming field for some time and £4.99/month will give you access to over 35 million tracks and support for pretty much every mobile, gaming and connected device imaginable. In addition to the paid for service there is Spotify Free – a free ad supported service with no offline mode and a lower quality audio (96kbps – 160kbps Ogg Vorbis).
In the US, Spotify have come up with an almost unbeatable student offer of Spotify, Hulu and SHOWTIME for $4.99/month.
Spotify upgrades Premium deal for US students
Desert Island Discs and other BBC podcasts now on Spotify
11 Dance Sub Genres from Spotify to enjoy
TIDAL
Save £120-£240 per year
TIDAL is unique amongst the mainstream streaming services in being artist owned. Unlike the other streamers it offers student discounts for both its TIDAL Premium (320kbps AAC) and TIDAL HiFi (CD Quality) subscriptions. You can get the Premium subscription for £4.9/month and a HiFi subscription for £9.99 giving you a whopping £240 saving over the full price. You are also able to access 53 million tracks in all genres – Pop, Rock, Classical, Jazz, World, Soundtracks etc.
YouTube
YouTube Music and YouTube Music Premium are Google’s relaunched music streaming service which is designed to replace Google Play Music. YouTube Music is a free Ad supported service with no offline mode and YouTube Music Premium is a £9.99/month service which would appear to have the same 40 million track catalogue as Google Play Music. Audio quality is a disappointing 128kpbs HE-ACC ‘dropping to 64kbps as needed to’. YouTube Music Premium currently does not offer a student discount.
Free music sources for students
Free music streaming
Amazon with its Prime Music, DEEZER Free, SoundCloud Free, SoundCloud Basic, and Spotify Free are all ad-supported music streaming services. The audio quality on all of these is somewhat reduced but may well be ok if you just want something to drown out a noisy commute or the pounding of your heart whilst jogging.
From time to time we get to hear of artists or organisations offering free downloads and here are a couple of recent freebies.
Download Kerri Chandler Deep House tracks for free
Free music and sound effects for academic work
If you are looking for copyright free audio for a video, presentation or other multimedia project the following websites offer thousands of music and sound clips that you can freely use in your work.
BBC Sound Effects free to download
Internet Radio
There are literally thousands of radio stations broadcasting for free offering every kind of music, talk radio and drama from around the world. Apps are also available for iOS and Android which give access to every kind of content.
CD Quality Internet radio can also be streamed via a browser, music server or app.
CD Quality Internet Radio
How to listen to lossless FLAC Internet Radio with your browser
Here is a list of some apps that have both iOS and Android support on mobile and can be accessed via your browser or in some cases a desktop app.
The BBC have recently launched an iPlayer replacement app called Sounds which offers the BBC’s complete range of national and local radio channels, catch-up radio and podcasts.
BBC Sounds App launched as iPlayer Radio replacement
Library resources
Alexander Street
Universities with music departments often subscribe to Alexander Street an online music catalogue containing music from around the world. The catalogue spans classical, alternative rock, zydeco, ballet, operatic arias and alternative dance. It is primarily a teaching aid and contains 10 million audio recordings, 2500 hours of video and 1.3 million pages of music scores. Further information can be obtained here. York University is one example of a library subscribing to this service but you should check out your library to see if they subscribe to this service.
Naxos
Many university libraries subscribe to the Naxos Music Library (NML) which is the world´s largest online classical music library. Currently, it offers streaming access to more than 131,280 CDs with more than 2,009,000 tracks of both standard and rare repertoire. Over 800 new CDs are added to the library every month. It also includes background information such as libretti and synopses and work analyses and details.
A list of universities subscribing to Naxos is below but you should check your university or college library to see if they also have access.
The University of Edinburgh Information Services
Oxford Brookes University Library
Royal College of Music, London Library
The University of Sheffield Library
Freegal Music
In the UK the following libraries offer the Freegal Music service which has 15 million tracks including the entire Sony Music catalogue. Users can download 5 tracks per week as well as unlimited streaming with tracks ranging from Jimi Hendrix and Elvis Presley to modern artists such as Camila Cabello and Justin Timberlake.
Go to this link and click on the Login button and enter United Kingdom in the Country drop down and get direct links to these libraries:
- Aberdeenshire Libraries
- Bedford Libraries
- Bromley Libraries
- Doncaster Libraries
- Dudley Libraries
- Glasgow Libraries
- Greenwich Libraries
- Library Ideas Great Britain
- Lincolnshire Libraries
- London Borough of Tower Hamlets
- North Ayrshire Libraries
- Northamptonshire Libraries
- Orkney Library
- Portsmouth Central Library
- Suffolk Libraries
- Wandsworth Libraries
The Freegal service is also available in Australia, Bermuda, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand and Switzerland and can be searched from the same login screen.
University library revision playlists
University libraries are usually associated with silence and disapproving looks for anyone making even the slightest of noises. But not any more. Librarians are now creating Spotify playlists for students to listen to on their headphones. The power of digital playlists to inspire academic study has been acknowledged by Oxford, Newcastle and Liverpool Universities, among others.
They created song compilations before the summer exams and freshers can expect more of the same this autumn. Head on over to Newcastle University to sample their Top 5 Revision Playlists.
You can also check out The Sainsbury Library, part of the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library for their Library Ambience (music to help you focus and study in the library) and Library Books (library themed songs) playlists.
Other free stuff for students
Not forgetting that you have to actually study at university or college, here is a great offer from Microsoft. You can get a free subscription to Office 365 Education.
Office 365 Education is a collection of services that allows you to collaborate and share your schoolwork. It’s available for free to teachers who are currently working at an academic institution and to students who are currently attending an academic institution. The service includes Office Online (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote), unlimited personal cloud storage, Yammer, and SharePoint sites. Some institutions allow teachers and students to install the full set of Office applications on up to 5 PCs or Macs for free. If your school or college provides this additional benefit, you’ll see the Install Office button on your Office 365 home page after you complete sign-up. Go here for more details.
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