Samsung Music Hub takes on its well-established rival, the Apple iTunes service
Samsung has just launched its Music Hub service so we thought it'd be a good idea to see how it compares to the old guard, Apple's iTunes platform.
Content
The most immediate way to directly compare the two is their respective music catalogues. Currently iTunes has over 20 million tracks while Samsung has clearly been rather busy as it has already accumulated around 19 million.
Apple does have more but not by a huge stretch and it's likely Samsung is still in the process of accumulating more content for its rival service as it's planning not just on tackling iTunes but other competing services such as Spotify too.
Another key difference lies between the two free and subscription based branches of each service. With iTunes you can optionally sign-up for iTunes Match for £21.99 per year.
This allows users to scan their entire music collection and iTunes Match will either upload tracks it doesn't have to the iCloud (up to 25,000 of them) or offer you access to ones which it does.
Ultimately using this you can access and stream your entire collection through the cloud from any location in the world via an iOS device or iTunes client.
Samsung's Music Hub has a similar feature but its approach to subscriptions is more broad-brush. With Music Hub you've either got the free option which lets you browse the entire 19 million track catalogue and listen to 30 second streams, but after the 30 seconds you have to buy the track to carry on listening.
The alternative is a £9.99 per month ‘Premium' account which frees up the whole catalogue for you to stream freely and store for offline use. Importantly, iTunes still doesn't let you do this.
On top of that, the premium model will do what iTunes Match does by scanning your existing music collection and allowing you to access those tracks through the Music Hub. If you've got any tracks it can't match you'll get 100GB of cloud storage and it'll upload those oddball tunes for you.
Most importantly of all, this scanning of your existing collection doesn't end at mp3 files or scanned CDs, it'll recognise content you've bought on iTunes and integrate these as well.
Accessibility
A crucial difference which could give Samsung's Music Hub the edge is that it can be used via a web browser. iTunes can be used on variety of devices by installing the iTunes client or app, but a browser-based approach is far more universal.
However, it's important to note that currently Music Hub is only available on the Samsung Galaxy S3, but this is set to change in the not-too-distant future.
Samsung is already hard at work getting things ready so that you'll be able to access it from a variety of Samsung smartphones and tablets and even Blu-Ray players, Smart TVs, speaker docks and fridges will be getting a look in. Theoretically you'll be able to access your music from any device in your home, assuming you buy mainly Samsung products, of course.
Eventually there'll also be a Music Hub app for iOS devices too so Samsung really is taking the fight to Apple's home turf. We imagine it's quite likely an Android app will be launched to make the service available on non-Samsung Android devices and there's plenty of scope for other operating systems too.
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