Music Apps For Music Junkies

The built-in Music app on iOS is a decent music player, with the sort of minimalist design you’ve come to expect from Apple. But if you want a more beautiful music player with a decidedly gesture-based interface and a clear focus on your music (as opposed to including the clutter that is Apple Music), check out Ecoute.

Even with the myriad music tracks residing in your library, you might still want to listen to what’s riding the airwaves. Don’t have a conventional radio? No problem. There’s this thing called Internet radio and there’s this app called TuneIn Radio.

Remember when MTV actually meant what its name stood for: Music Television? Ah, those were the days, when MTV played music videos back to back to back to back. Now, there are hardly any music videos in the channel’s programming, which instead favors reality, animated and scripted shows. Thankfully, you can search and watch music videos anytime on YouTube. Better yet, you can just use the official iOS app of the service that provides those music videos, Vevo.

We’ve all been there (hearing a song we like) and done that (trying to figure out what it’s called and whom it’s by to no avail). Fortunately, now we don’t have to ask around or scrape the tip of our tongues to know the title of and the artist behind a currently playing song. Now we just have to summon Shazam.

You may not know it, but you’ve probably thought up or blurted out a mondegreen on more than one occasion. A mondegreen, by the way, is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase, usually a song lyric. If you want to stop perpetuating mondegreens and be adequately informed about the lyrics to your favorite songs, just get along and sing along with Musixmatch.

More often than not, it’s neither by accident nor by devious design that a song, or a portion thereof, sounds a lot like another song. It’s simply because the song is a cover or a remix of another song, a mashup incorporating two or more different songs, or a track containing samples of other songs. In any case, be it a cover, a remix, a mashup, or a work that includes samples, a “derivative” song can be easily described in terms of its component songs using WhoSampled.

If you consider yourself a music junkie (but of course you do, otherwise you won’t be reading this), you probably enjoy going to concerts. And now more than ever, keeping up to date with and buying tickets to your favorite artists’ live shows is trouble-free, especially with your iOS device and the Songkick Concerts app.

You need not actually attend concerts to enjoy concerts. If you don’t mind watching recordings of concerts on a screen instead of experiencing them live and in person, you may find to your liking this rather impressive app called Qello, which has been rightfully dubbed the “Netflix for concerts.”

If you’d like to hold your very own mini concert in the comfort of your home and in the company of other singers from anywhere in the world, you can do just that. All you have to do is join the global karaoke party that is Sing! Karaoke.

Bono, the famous frontman of the famous band U2, foretold a time when it would be possible to “find out what people are actually listening to.” That time came when Soundwave was launched, according at least to the makers of the popular music-sharing app, which makes sharing your music virtually effortless as it automatically captures what you’re playing on Spotify, YouTube, and other connected channels.

In addition to listening to new songs and artists at the behest of your friends, you can learn about the best new music through established music blogs. And you’ll be hard pressed to find a more excellent aggregator of music blogs than the venerable Hype Machine.