Digital music continues to become cheaper and more easily available, and Microsoft is seemingly pushing it forward with free Web streaming for Xbox Music, plus iOS and Android apps to take it on the go.
Last year, Microsoft unveiled Xbox Music, transitioning its Zune music service into something with a broader appeal. At the time, users who owned an Xbox or Windows 8 machine could stream music for free using a dedicated app. Fortunately, that's still the case; if you use the dedicated app, you'll hear an ad ever so often (between the first and second song, in my case) but it remains free.
A MOG or Spotify-like Web player sounds like a terrific upgrade, and in some ways it is. If you've uploaded anything to the Xbox Music cloud, you'll be able to listen to it on a variety of browsers: Internet Explorer 8+, Firefox 18+, Chrome 24+ and Safari 5.1+, among others.
But the only way to sign up for the "free" unlimited Web streaming at music.xbox.com appears to be via a Xbox Music Pass, a free-30 day trial that transforms itself into a paid $9.99/month subscrption unless you cancel the subscription before the allotted 30-day trial period is up. An annual, $99.90 option is also available.
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