Guest Mark Dearlove Posted January 23, 2012 Report Share Posted January 23, 2012 There is a new streaming music service in town that goes by the name of bloom.fm. If you were a user of the excellent music site mFlow that shut down last year then you will probably be aware that they were working on a replacement service. Bloom.fm is that new service that has risen from mFlow's ashes. Unlike mFlow, which was based on users sharing recommendations to others, bloom.fm will be much more familiar to users of other music sites like last.fm and we7.com. What bloom.fm does differently is that they allow you to 'borrow' tracks from their library. The number of tracks you can borrow at once depends on the subscription level you buy (although in the current beta all levels are free). Prices haven't been released yet but the app will solicit your opinion on how much you would be willing to pay when you try and upgrade from one level to another during the beta. There are 4 different levels in their subscription model: bloom zero gives you Free genre based and user based internet radiobloom 20 gives you unlimited radio plus the ability to borrow up to 20 tracks at once, and adverts are removedbloom 200 is as above but with 200 track borrowing, and higher quality audiobloom full gives you unlimited playback and borrowing, and allows you to use the radio options while offline too bloom.fm is available on Android and iOS and will be availaible via the web. As you can see from the images above, the application is pretty intuitive therefore it's easy to use. The designers look like they have put a lot of work into getting the flow just right. The colour scheme and icons may put a few people off - my wife thought it looked like it was made for kids, but I quite like it. That's not to say there aren't issues. I had difficulty getting a borrowed track to play past the 30 second preview. I eventually found a work around - borrow, unborrow, borrow again and you can play the whole track. I have reported this to the developers who so far have been very forthcoming with communication. There are lots of prebuilt radio stations to choose from, and more are being added. One comment I read from a user was that a genre was suggested one day and added the next day - thats pretty good. There are currently around 6 million tracks to choose from but I did find some of the artists had a lot of albums missing. It may just be that my musical tastes are a bit dated but I expected to be able to find more than one Embrace album. Additionally the every latest tracks don't seem to be there for some artists. My daughter is a big fan of Ed Sheeran so was disappointed to find just 3 tracks by him, none of which are actual released versions of his tracks, just remixes and live tracks. No doubt there are licencing issues to be done and more will get added in time. The buffering time for the tracks was decent on a 3G and WiFi connection but this will obviously depend on the quality of your connection. I particularly like the artist discovery functionality. The similar artists lists seem to be logical, unlike some suggestions I have had on other sites. I am sure it will spring up a few surprises - I didn't expect to hear Kenickie on my walk earlier, but it brought back a few memories, not necessarily great ones! All in all I am pretty impressed. I hope the small improvements get done before general release and the pricing structure is realistic. If you want to try out the app then head over to the bloom.fm site for the apk file. bloom.fm is currently only available in the UK This item was promoted to the News page - click here to view. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Paul77 Posted January 24, 2012 Report Share Posted January 24, 2012 Bloom has been available as a testflight app on ios for quite a few weeks now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Mark Dearlove Posted January 24, 2012 Report Share Posted January 24, 2012 cheers Paul, I have updated the article Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Paul77 Posted January 29, 2012 Report Share Posted January 29, 2012 Thanks. I've been using this for a while on the iPhone (work made me have one!) - glad it's finally come over to Android. The borrow function is excellent, particularly once your account has been upgraded to unlimited. Grazing on the catalogue of tracks can be a bit addictive but bloom has successfully sold the idea of a subscription based music service to me. I just hope they don't set the prices too high. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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