I can’t work in silence. And if I’m working with words — which is most of the time — I can’t work while playing typical pop, rock or hip-hop. So I collect instrumental and foreign-language music on a scale better measured by weeks than by hours. Here are some of my greatest sources of background music for work, studying, and creativity.

If you haven’t tried Spotify Premium yet, now you can take the music service for a test drive for three months for free before you’ll have to start paying for a subscription.

Listening to classical music is a bit different from listening to modern pop music. The music is built differently - most recordings aren’t performed by their composers, and there’s rarely one definitive recording of a piece. Multiple works are often released on the same album. Track titles are very long, including a work’s catalogue number, its movement number, possibly its speed and even its fan-given nickname. Most streaming services aren’t built to accommodate this. A few are, and the best one is Idagio.

Pandora’s musical curation is a big reason the site still stands out among competition from Spotify, Google, Apple, and YouTube. Professional music analysts listen to tracks and identify common elements, building the Music Genome Project that powers Pandora’s customised user stations.

As a Senior Music Analyst, Hannah Glass is deciding what you listen to next. We talked to her about her work at Pandora, her musical background, and her own projects as a performer.

Every music streaming service kind of sucks, we already know this. One of the ways Spotify sucks is that it limits how many songs you can download on each device. But the service just raised its download limit from 3333 tracks per device up to 10,000 per device, for up to five devices. Great news for anyone who needs to keep their data use down, or use Spotify anywhere with bad reception. You can finally listen to the music you pay $11.99/month for!

This week Instagram made it a lot easier to add music to your Instagram stories. Facebook recently made a deal with a number of record labels, which means that tunes are available on Instagram as well.

For a while, I had a bit of an obsession with buying vinyl. My mum had let me have the large cabinet record player that lived in our living room during my childhood, and once I got the 225kg thing into my house I was determined to listen to it as much as possible.

Google is back with yet another music streaming service. This time the company is rebranding YouTube Red and splitting it into two new options named YouTube Music and YouTube Premium.

Spotify just revamped its free tier, which means you get more than ever before without actually having to pay anything — (some) on-demand playlists on mobile, unlimited skips (on a few playlists) and personalised recommendations to more accurately reflect your tastes. So does it make Spotify Premium a waste of money?

Spotify might be the default choice for many when it comes to streaming music, but it doesn't hurt to try out other options, especially if you can do so without spending a cent. If you want to give Deezer a go, you can get three whole months of premium access free right now.

Instead of shopping around for a streaming service that will ultimately disappoint you, why not cut out the middleman and start using a music library you actually own? Advantages such as uninterrupted music, increased portability, and increased longevity of the hardware you actually use make it worth the cost of a few albums.

Your Discover Weekly probably doesn't suck - the feature is so popular that it's the subject of long glowing profiles on tech blogs and business blogs. Spotify even built an ad campaign out of users tweeting how much they love the feature. Each week, every active Spotify user gets a new list of 30 tracks, and over half of them find a new favourite. But depending on your Spotify habits, it is possible to get a garbage Discover Weekly. Here's what's happening and how to fix it.

Google launched a new browser-based music sequencer Thursday that allows users to be both song writer and producer and create their own simple jams using Chrome.

Whoa, hold on there, person about to exchange money for movies or music - do you know how much free stuff is out there on the web, all legally released and available for anyone to listen to or watch? If you want to spend less on your entertainment budget and maybe discover some interesting new stuff at the same time, here's where to look.

Spotify's algorithm-generated playlists try, but they don't always hit the mark. If you want to mess with the recipe a bit, try out Nelson, the Spotify playlist generator that lets you customise what shows up on your playlist based on the kind of music (or musical elements) you enjoy.

VLC, the Swiss Army knife of media players, has been updated to version 3.0.0. The latest version adds some much-needed features to the player, including one that could make streaming all that content from your computer to your living room TV a lot easier: Chromecast support (among other things).

While the mixtape is long gone, you still might be looking for a new way to share your latest weekend mix with your coworkers, or stay connected to friends across the country by jamming out to your favourite songs together. Now you can use JQBX to share playlists, vote on songs, and lend your musical taste to everyone with a Spotify account.

It's fun sharing music with people, especially while you're doing other fun things. If you use Discord to chat with your gaming friends (or anyone really), now you can listen to music as a group with built-in Spotify connectivity.

SoundCloud recently switched its music streams from 128Kb/s MP3 to 64Kb/s Opus. Many users hear a drop in sound quality in the higher frequencies. So artist Joseph Lyncheski, aka Direct, built an extension for Chrome and Firefox to force the site to stream in its old format. (For now, Safari is still streaming in MP3.)