Yesterday Eircom released their new music streaming service, Eircom Music Hub, here in Ireland. There is not too many websites that allow for music streaming, at least not here in Ireland.

If you are currently an Eircom customer then you can sign up with your account number and phone number and straight away start streaming music for free! The basic package for existing customers is free, it only allows for streaming, there are two other packages from €5.99 to €12.99, these include the extra benefit of being able to download so many songs per month, but I do not think it is worth paying because for €5.99 you still get the streaming from the free package and are only allowed 15 downloads, not a lot, but more than iTunes.

The second packages at €12.99 allows for 40 downloads and the free streaming service. In my opinion, if I was to use this service I wouldn’t pay for the downloads, if I am with Eircom, which I am, then I am more than happy with the free streaming service.

On the other side, if you are not an Eircom customer you can still use their new service, the packages begin at €6.99 for the unlimited streaming per month. Then €11.99 and €22.99 for the same packages I talked about for the current customers above.

So I signed up for the service yesterday when it came out and it is pretty good. It is currently in Beta so they are still working on it and at the moment although there is a lot of music, they are still adding more. Most of the artists I looked up only had one of their albums available, but it is not a bad start for the first day it is out!

It will be interesting to see how this service turns out, it has the current charts on the front page and also show some playlists that other users have made, also you can see what others are listening to at the moment.

I like that you can navigate to other pages and the song keeps playing. The design is nice too, when you scroll down the page the music player will always stick to the top so you can always get to the pause and volume controls if you need them.

There are a few things that it could benefit from, the first is that if you try to close the music hub’s tab/window that it shows a message warning  you that the song will stop, this is just like the feature that GrooveShark has, people sometimes forget that the song will stop!

Also if you could have some sort of desktop version it would also be nice or even a plugin for your browser so that you can control the player without having to go back to the Music Hub page, there is a plugin for Google chrome that someone made for GrooveShark and it works really well.

So at the moment if I was to choose between the two, I would actually probably go for Eircom’s service. Why? To be honest the interface is a million times better than GrooveShark, I find it easier to navigate and find what you are looking for. If you have an Eircom account and haven’t tried it out yet, then head on over to the MusicHub!