Want free music for the Christmas holidays? Of course you do, and it's easy to get if you sign up with JB Hi-Fi NOW's free beta trial, which launched yesterday.
JB Hi-Fi NOW's music streaming service launched in beta yesterday, and in an attempt to attract fans to the platform JB is offering users who sign up 30 days of free music streaming. Now before you get all antsy about having to provide your credit card details for a supposedly 'free' deal, let's allay your fears: setup is a cinch.
Registration simply requires providing your mobile number and an email address, after which you're sent a passcode to complete your registration. No financial deets are involved (for the 30 day tryout anyway), which is a nice touch and likely to encourage more users to give the service a go, as folk won't have to worry about possibly needing to cancel their subscription later once the free trial is over.
Speaking of which, once your 30 days of free streaming are over, you're looking at pretty agreeable subscription rates too: three months for $25 or six months for $50 (both clocking $8.33 per month) or 12 months for $80 ($6.67 per month). And how does the service stack up? Nicely. We were up and running in minutes, streaming directly with Chrome. There don't seem to be any app offerings as yet for those going mobile, and firing the site up on Android's Dolphin browser indicated JB Hi-Fi NOW "is not available on mobile phones." Still, if you're content to listen from your PC or Mac, the service offers licences for over 10 million tracks (some still being loaded into the back end), a music discovery engine, featured music and recommendations, mixtape functionality and a Crowd feature where you can see what others are listening to. Playback was generally fine and speedy, although we did hear a few glitches during one track.
One thing definitely worth noting: your profile is by default set to 'Standard' which means everyone using JB Hi-Fi NOW will be easily able to see your profile picture, play history, mixes and favourites. If you don't want to broadcast what you're listening to, select the Private option in your account's privacy settings.
