Music Unlimited

Wed Jul 16, 2014 11:57 am

Playstation Blog | Redesigned Music Unlimited App

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Sony's music service carries a base price 0f $10/month in the US. The $10/price is on par with competitors Spotify, Google Play Music All Access, and maybe Amazon Prime Music. As a hardware company, Sony sells incredible products. Their software is always underwhelming and sometimes, downright bad. Music Unlimited manages to be both underwhelming and bad at the same time.

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(PS4) Sony recently redesigned their PS4 app for better ease of use. The only music option built in to the firmware, I paid for a few months of the service because it's nice to be able to open the app, pick an album or playlist and have it play over the games I'm playing, like when grinding the sidequests in Watch Dogs. It's easy to hold the PS button to jump to a menu and adjust the music levels. I recently stopped paying for the app as it's overkill to pay for Spotify (the best option in my opinion) and get Amazon's weak offering built into my Prime subscription. The PS4 app is Sony's best effort so far.

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(PS3) The PS3 app offers a pretty lousy setup. Unless you have a home theater setup with the PS3, it's a waste to just listen to music on the PS3 since you can't really do anything else on the console when playing music. And last I checked, the UI was fairly awful. It's easier to just plug a phone/tablet/computer into the home theater for music listening purposes.

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(Vita) Like the PS4, you can play music in the background while playing other games. It works ok, and is much easier to navigate with a touchscreen. Pinning songs for offline playback works fine as well.

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(Mobile) There are much better music options out there to use on your phone. If you use iOS items, then you're familiar with iTunes. Standouts like Spotify and Google Play Music still outshine Sony here. But if you buy into Sony's Music Unlimited eco-system, it's nice to have the option to maximize your subscription.

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(PC) Desktop apps work better, again like Spotify. Sony does not offer a downloadable desktop app. As far as web apps go, Sony's is actually competent. It's organized much better than Amazon's Prime Music and is more functional. Google's web service is still better though.

Smart TVs typically offer Music Unlimited as well. But almost all TV apps are just awful and not worth mentioning.