Unfortunately the availability of most of these services are usually US- and Europe-only, due to licensing restrictions from record label companies. The choices for local users have generally been very narrow, ranging from using VPNs to listening poor-quality streams, and most commonly, simply pirating songs altogether.

Just recently, I heard of a new service called WOWLOUD. At that time, it wasn’t launched yet so the only thing I saw on the site was a simple form to register your interest. I signed up, and just last week I received an email from their team telling me to activate my account. And so I did.

They prompted me to upgrade to a promotional-priced RM9.90/mo premium account, but I figured that I’ll just stick with the free access pass while I just poke around. There are a few limitations for the free account, namely a 20-hour monthly listen limit and advertisements. You will also miss out on the premium-only “high fidelity music” feature. However, that’s just about the only differences I can find thus far. A Premium Plus account is said to be “coming soon” that features mobile access as well.

Regardless of which you pick, you will still get the ability to create custom playlists, pre-cache your music offline and sync them across multiple devices. It is worth noting that unlike other major cloud music services, WOWLOUD is only accessible from their client app – there is no web player (ala Grooveshark) so you’ll have to install the client on all computers that you’ll want to bring your music to.

Upon login, you’ll see a fairly clean interface that shows you the latest songs and top charts on WOWLOUD. There’s also a news feed lower down, but it appears to be just a feed of their Twitter account. Advertisements will loop along the top and right columns.

The navigation pane on the left will let you switch between views, among them your Play Queue, Local Files, a list of your playlists, and the title/album art of the currently-playing song. You can create a new playlist by double-clicking on “+ Add New Playlist”, giving it a name, then dragging songs from your queue onto the new playlist.

WOWLOUD aims to replace your traditional music player altogether, which explains the Local Files menu. You can import the songs you already have on your computer into the WOWLOUD app and play them as you normally would. However, imported songs do not sync between devices which could cause some confusion if you frequently switch between computers.

If you’re feeling adventurous, you can explore the various charts and add songs that you like into your playlist. At the moment, the charts include seasonal (it’s currently a Halloween Chart), top songs of the year, and others that are categorized by language and genre such as Chinese, Kpop/Jpop, Rock, Country, Jazz/Blues and Dance/Club.

Despite being on a free account, the quality of the songs are decent. Unless you’re a serious audiophile, you won’t hear much difference between the songs on WOWLOUD and those on your personal stereos. In fact, if you’re currently listening to low-quality pirated songs (and if you are, shame on you!) then WOWLOUD might even sound better.

With Sony Music, Universal Music, Warner Music and One Stop Music partnered up for WOWLOUD, you will find most if not all of the songs that you usually listen to.

However, there were several occasions that I couldn’t find songs that I enjoy. In fact, despite having a picture of Michael Bublé on the Top Charts, a search for his name yielded no results. David Foster, Charice and other popular jazz artistes aren’t on the catalogue either. Of course, you can forget finding most unsigned musicians like David Choi and Deadmau5, unless you can somehow convince them to get their songs on WOWLOUD.

Also worth noting in the free version is audio advertisements. Yes, after every few songs, WOWLOUD will uncannily insert a short advertisement before proceeding with the next song in the queue. While not majorly annoying, it could be distracting (or, as you might call it, potong stim) if you’re in the middle of a party dancing to some pop songs played over WOWLOUD, only to be interrupted by ads. The worst part is, the ads themselves are currently low-quality, mushy recordings of artistes endorsing WOWLOUD. More often than not you can’t even hear what they are trying to say. Things might improve as WOWLOUD grows bigger. Hopefully.

The official word is that WOWLOUD accounts are given out by-invitation only, but there’s apparently a loophole: you can head over to the premium sign-up page, register your account, skip the payment step – and voilà!

Head over to the WOWLOUD site to find out more, and if you have already played around with it, let me know how you’ve been finding it thus far!

Update: As a friend pointed out to me on Twitter, the WOWLOUD app does look remarkably alike Spotify’s client. Comparing both, it’s hard to ignore the similarities.