Does Current / Mode pay out?

DON'T BOTHER WITH THIS APP ANYMORE unless you like doing surveys. That's the only thing that works mostly-reliably. Everything else is prone to freezing and crashing -- even just playing music.

UPDATE (2022-July-5): The video ads that play will cause the app to freeze up and crash.

UPDATE (2022-July-1): They steadily introduced advertisements into every square inch they could find but this has apparently caused constant crashing of the app everywhere.

You can't even leave it to play music without it crashing every few minutes.

And now, trying to read news articles will cause an advertisement to play. If you try to skip it early to get back to finally reading the news, it will play another advertisement.

And when you do finally get to see the news article, there's a good chance the app will just outright crash.

Also, playing games for points did not get me any points at all. Seems like the tracking is completely broken.

DON'T BOTHER WITH THIS APP ANYMORE

 

UPDATE (2022-May-17): Earnings have steadily decreased. Not just in promotional multipliers removed or reduced, but the music earning rate has basically been reduced to one quarter (1/4) of what it was at the time I wrote this review.

 
Does Current / Mode pay out? Absolutely YES, and much more than any other app I've seen.

Current (from the Apple App Store) or Mode (from Google Play) is an app that "pays you to play music". When you listen to music, you accumulate points per minute, and thousands of points later, you can redeem some rewards, including cash deposited to Paypal.

There are various other activities such as playing games or doing surveys or even reading news articles to help you get points faster. They've been running "limited time" bonuses for certain activities like surveys, but since that's been going on for weeks now, it's probable the "limited time" is just fear-of-missing-out style advertising. But they do get you points fsat.

You can mostly listen to music

It says you can get paid to listen to music, and that's a great source of passive point accumulation, but you actually cannot ONLY listen to music. If you are completely idle that way thinking you can just leave it on all the time as a radio, you will discover after a couple of hours that your earnings have stopped. You then need to do a "check-in" to recover any banked points (see Slide 2).

• Only a maximum of 60 points are banked no matter how much time has elapsed.
• You can avoid this by doing some point-earning activity every hour or so, such as reading the news. This is fast and easy -- and therefore gets you only a handful of points.
• If you wait too long and get a check-in warning, you will have to choose from their list of activities, which can typically take longer and therefore be disruptive to whatever you were doing at the time.

Suppose you want to use Mode like a "radio station" and ONLY want to listen to music (and are willing to do some news-reading check-ins every hour or so). This lets you be mostly idle while earning points toward a reward. But the rate of getting a reward is very slow.

• A typical rate of music earnings is 1.7 points per minute.
• A $0.50 USD Paypal redemption is 4,960 points (see slide 3) but you DON'T want the small payouts because the bigger payouts cost less points per unit. -- a $20 USD is 39,950 points.(see slide 4).
• Note that Paypal collects a percentage for their fees (see slide 5) so you'll only get around $19.20 USD.
• 39,950 points will take over 16 days of non-stop music from the app at 1.7 points per minute. Which is actually not that bad and at least you can calculate when you will get paid and how much.

Because you can be mostly idle, I highly recommend Current / Mode because just "leaving the radio on" is something you can multitask while doing something else -- just don't expect to make any significant money and remember to do your easy check-ins.

Earning points faster: Watching Advertisements

This is s the typical way most pay-you-to-play apps let you earn points. Here, you can get a handful of points (around 10) but it's quite random. An advertisement might just award 1 point, which works out to approximately the same as if you had just been idle listening to music.

The more ads you watch, the more likely you will start getting lower-paying ads, or sometimes no qualifying ads for you to watch at all.

Earning points faster: Surveys

As mentioned before you can earn points faster by doing various activities, such as Surveys. These are best done when you have nothing better to do with your time because the result is uncertain. If you don't qualify for a survey, you can end up answering quite a few questions but get only a few points, or none at all.

When you do get points, they can be worth around 500 or so, or approximately 5 hours worth of music.

However, over time you will exhaust the surveys if you do too many, and start to encounter more and more time-wasting zero-point disqualifications.

Earning points faster: Playing Games

There are two ways to play games for points. One way is to select their "Games" option but but I found this to be highly unreliable, so be wary.

The other way is to select their "Offers" options. There are two types - Mega Offers and Super Offers.

Mega Offers generally require signing up for a subscription and/or buying something in order to complete the offer. Super Offers typically do not and have easier requirements. I recommend looking for something with no time limit to complete the offer if you are able.

You're not really being paid to play games here -- the tasks are typically such that you are pressured to either watch a lot of ads or pay real money to actually meet the deadlines. If you can find one that doesn't have a rigid time limit, at least make sure you actually like to play the game before you devote time to it.

Overall, Surveys are recommended over playing games as the time commitment required generally far outweighs the points you get, and if you fail to meet the requirements in the time limit, you get nothing.