Free music streaming services are a dime a dozen, but few offer a quality experience without taking their leave of the realm of reality. Humm is a multiplatform service that costs nothing and is ad-free: by making use of the YouTube API, it offers a catalogue of more than 50 million songs with a practical search and favorites system that also suggests recommended songs based on global trends and your own playlist. Besides its web client, there’s an official Android app that’s just been launched.
Humm tries to step into Spotify’s territory with an open project that offers a large chunk of the features of that popular streaming service, such as organizing your favorite artists, albums, and songs; creating custom playlists; and broadcasting automated radio stations by genre or based on your tastes, among many other things. To use it, all you need is to register on the platform (either with your email or using the Facebook or Twitter social login) to save your preferences and take advantage of the multiplatform component. But you can access Humm’s full content even without registering.
As noted, Humm uses the YouTube API to play content, but always respecting its terms of use, meaning at no time may you extract or locally download audio or video. The only problem with this system is that it’s limited to content uploaded to the video hosting giant, and although by this point there’s practically nothing that’s not on YouTube, searching on Humm can sometimes get tedious precisely because you can’t find what you’re looking for beyond the mainstream. To resolve that, from Humm itself you can suggest videos and artists to be indexed in the catalog, as well as make use of Humm’s internal API for any other purpose.
Humm was born of a promising startup with roots in Spain that aims to provide an agile alternative to the inveterate dinosaurs within the realm of music streaming. With the Android client recently launched, they are already thinking about releasing the version for iOS. Its free and open philosophy let it cover its back in a market as risky as this one, meaning it just remains to be seen how accepted it becomes among users given the massive spread of tools of this sort.
More information | Humm
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