Music streaming, in plain words

An AI DJ is a streaming-app feature that picks the next song based on your taste, then introduces it in a synthetic voice — like a personal radio host.

BPM means beats per minute — a measure of song tempo. A typical pop song runs 100–130 BPM. Workout playlists target 130–150 BPM. Lullabies sit under 80.

Collaborative filtering is a recommendation technique that suggests songs you might like based on what similar listeners liked. Spotify's Discover Weekly is its most famous deployment.

Create a Mix is a feature in Trending Music that builds a personalized playlist for the moment you're in — pick where you are, how you're feeling, and the genre you want, and a fresh playlist generates in three taps.

A daylist is a continuously updating playlist that shifts throughout the day to match the listener's typical mood at that time — "liminal cottagecore tuesday morning" instead of "Pop Hits."

Free music apps come in three flavors: ad-supported with full features (rare), ad-supported with heavily-locked features (most major services), and fully-free with no paywall (small).

Lossless audio is digital audio compressed without throwing away any of the original signal — the file is smaller, but every bit is preserved. Most streaming uses lossy compression like AAC or MP3 instead.

A music alarm clock is an app feature that wakes you up to a song from your library — instead of a generic ringtone — and gradually ramps the volume so the morning is less jarring.

Music discovery is the process of finding new songs and artists you didn't know you'd like — typically through algorithms, friend recommendations, music journalism, or radio.

Music video streaming is what it sounds like — playing the official video for a song instead of just the audio. Until recently, only YouTube and YouTube Music supported it; in 2026 Apple Music and Trending Music both ship music videos as core features.

Offline playback (or "offline downloads") lets you save a song / playlist to the device for listening without an internet connection — useful on flights, in subways, or anywhere data is spotty.

Personalized radio is an auto-extending station seeded from a song, artist, or genre — the next track is picked from the recommendation engine based on the seed plus your listening history, and the queue never ends.

Shazam is Apple-owned audio-fingerprinting technology that identifies a song playing nearby in 5–8 seconds by matching a few seconds of ambient audio against a catalog of millions of tracks.

Spatial audio is a multi-channel audio format that places sounds in three-dimensional space around the listener — front, back, above, below — using either Dolby Atmos or Apple's head-tracking implementation.

Synced lyrics are song lyrics that scroll line-by-line in time with the music, highlighting the active line as the song plays — like karaoke without the cover-version backing track.