Blinkbox Music's premium service should not be mistaken for any kind of competitor to Google Play Music or Spotify.
Blinkbox Music is an online music streaming service, which now offers both a free option and a premium option - this review is about the premium option.
Blinkbox Music have around 12m songs, which sounds a lot but is paltry when compared with Google Play Music's 30 million, Spotify's 40 million, and last.fm's 45 million.
The service is very much built around the "online radio" model. You pick a genre, an artist, an album or a song and you "start radio". It then plays a selection of tracks which are supposed to match your criterion - whatever that was. There are also some ready-made playlists.
The free version inserts ads, but the new premium Music More service removes these.
In addition, the premium Music More service is advertised as letting you listen to "the latest albums" - i.e. you can listen to whole albums, and not just automatically generated playlists that you have no control over. In other words, they are claiming that their premium service does what Google Play Music and Spotify premium services have always done.
The good news is this: Blinkbox Music costs £4.33 per month. That's less than half of both Google Play Music and Spotify. That's the good news - all of it.
Here's the bad news. First, the radio-style listening feature is not great. If you want to straightforwardly pick a genre and start listening. The pre-done playlists are organised into categories the names for which are pretty much meaningless: "Fresh", "Feelgood", "Offbeat", "Blast!" - these could name many different types of music. Once you've chosen a category you're faced with with a set of choices. For example, under "Offbeat" one finds "We Recommend", "Weekend Wind Down" and so on. There are two main issues: (1) it's far from easy to find what you're looking for, (2) there are some glaring omissions. For example, under no category is there a playlist marked as "Singer-songwriter". The category "Heartland" - their name for "Folk and Country" - is dominated by US country, think Dolly Parton. There doesn't appear to be a pre-made list for stuff like Mumford & Sons, etc.
Second, and this is by far my biggest complaint, the "listen to the latest album" features is as poor an offering as it would be possible to provide. It is true that there is a way to listen to many of the latest albums. In order to do this you have to create a playlist for that album. Don't be fooled, though, this is not an easy task. You have to manually create a playlist, and then manually add each individual track from some album to that playlist. Only then can you listen to an album right though. This process is laborious.
What really takes the mic, however, is that you are limited to a maximum of 100 songs across all your playlists. That means that you could create a playlist for roughly 8 albums. If you wanted to listen to a 9th album, you would have to delete one of your existing playlists, making that album unplayable.
The Premium "listen to the latest albums" feature, then, is not so much a feature as a way of making yourself very frustrated.
I don't know who Blinkbox's Music More offering would be good for; but I know who it's not good for: anyone who wants a streaming service where they will have the freedom to play whatever music they want. Blinkbox Music More does not provide this. It is not a serious competitor to Google Play Music, but a third rate service based heavily around the concept of streaming radio stations which you have little control over. It seems to me that more serious music fans would be much (much, much) better off spending an extra £5.70 and getting Google's Play Music service.