The youth-oriented audio company associated with hip-hop pioneer Dr. Dre attempts to become a major player in the streaming music space with the recently released Beats Music, for Android (reviewed here) and iOS. The new service (free-to-use for 7 days, $9.99 per month afterward) specializes in curated playlists discovered by selecting favorite artists/genres or completing Mad Libs-like "Sentences," reflecting your mood. Beats Music, to its credit, dares to be a bit different, but many of the extra features unfortunately, are  gimmicky instead of useful. Still, if you're a themed playlist junkie, there's a lot to like.

Note: Beats Music has a special deal with AT&T that allows the carrier's users to take advantage of a $14.99 per month five-person family plan that grants unlimited streaming and offline listening to 10 devices.

Getting Started

You begin by creating a dedicated Beats Music account or by logging in with your Facebook or Twitter credentials. Beats Music then prompts you to select favorite genres and artists by tapping colored, labeled bubbles so that it may serve up a playlist mix that will please your ears. It's a novel way to seed music recommendations. In fact, I preferred Beats Music's method more than the traditional channel-building method employed by Slacker Radio which consists of keying in a single artist name/genre as it offers greater opportunity to define your playlists.

After selecting The Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Funkadelic, and other bass-heavy bands and genres, Beats Music presented a collection of playlists in the "Just For You" home screen that included "Michael Jackson: The 1970s," "Philly Soul Party," and "James Brown: 1950s & 1960s." It was exactly the mix I hoped to receive. What's interesting about this "Just For You" section—it's updated four times a day with fresh content based on users' musical preferences, time of day, and other factors. I was quite pleased with the discovery aspect—Beats Music pushed artists, albums, and playlists to the home screen without requiring any work on my part. Convenience is a helluva drug.

That said, Beat Music's interface could use some retooling. As you move from section to section by swiping left or right, it's very easy to accidentally open the side panels that house My Playlist (where your created playlists live), My Library (where you'll find music cached for offline playback), Search, and other options. Also, Beat Music's different sections have different layouts (with different fonts!) which give the app a very inconsistent feel other than the color scheme. On top of that, Beat Music's home screen is quite busy and difficult to read at times. The layout could be streamlined a bit.

The Big Playback

The sounds of Bad Religion, Curtis Mayfield, and some of my other favorite artists sounded super-crisp when I listened to their tracks using a pair of Sennheiser G4ME ZERO headphones—once you enable the 320 Kbps MP3 "high-quality" streaming option (otherwise the app will stream tunes at just 64 Kbps HE-AAC). Warning: High-quality streaming will devour your data plan, so you may want to set Beats Music to only stream at that bitrate when your phone is connected to a Wi-Fi signal.

As a track plays, a large circle (reminiscent of the iconic Beats logo) begins to fill with the familiar red color. This isn't just a way to show a song's runtime and promote the Beats Music brand; you can also tap anywhere within the circle and jump to a different part of the track—a nice touch. Unfortunately, the circle obscures the album art, which is disappointing to music fans like me who dig the visual element.

As with other streaming music services, Beats Music lets you favorite or ban songs to help the service determine the type of music to play in the future. What's unusual here is the option to loop songs, which can prove extremely useful when playing "Eye of the Tiger" at the gym.