Xbox Music streams songs on-demand for free on the web (for a fee on mobile devices)

Xbox Music

Stream millions of songs free on the web.

"Xbox Music gives you access to millions of songs to stream for free with Windows 8 and on the web atmusic.xbox.com. Search for any artist, song, or full album and instantly play what you want. You can even create and save playlists for easy access to the songs you love." - 

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/music

Xbox Music is the resurrected Zune music service only simplified and improved. Xbox Music is an ad-supported subscription music streaming service by Microsoft and also offers music purchases through the Xbox Music Store. It is available on Xbox 360, Windows 8, Windows Phone 8,iOS, Android and the web. The Xbox Music catalog has over 30 million tracks.

Xbox Music has a free options as well as $9.99 a month premium options. To start-off, you'll need an Xbox account along with Xbox Music Pass. There is a 30-day free trial you can sign up for.  If you pay $9.99 a month for the Xbox Music Pass you get ad-free, unlimited playback of any track in the subscription catalogue on your PC, phone (Windows Phone to start with, iOS and Android later on) or Xbox 360 – including playing music when you're not online. Once you have the Music Pass, you can listen to music on your desktop through a Web browser or on your iPhone. Xbox music is not optimized for iPad at launch, but you can use pixel-doubling(the x2  on the bottom right) from the iPhone app.

The major reason behind my admiration of Xbox Music is that it has a clean and simple interface that's very responsive during use, you search then play and listen to music.  You can, however, create playlists and add to your music collection that is shared across all your devices on the same account. Playlists are songs you picked that will be played in the order you add them. You can make as many

playlists as you want. But the collection is a kind of favorites list for all the songs you want easy access to across all your devices. Both are synced up to the cloud, so you can create a playlist on your iPhone or add songs to your collection, and then you can access them on other devices.

Obviosuly there are other music streaming service but the Xbox music interface is my personal best.