There is growing evidence that children with reading difficulties show impaired auditory rhythm perception and impairments in musical beat perception tasks. Rhythmic musical interventions with poorer readers may thus improve rhythmic entrainment and consequently improve reading and phonological skills. Here we compare the effects of a musical intervention for poor readers with a software intervention of known efficacy based on rhyme training and phoneme-grapheme learning. The research question was whether the musical intervention would produce gains of comparable effect sizes to the phoneme-grapheme intervention for children who were falling behind in reading development. Broadly, the two interventions had similar benefits for literacy, with large effect sizes. (Contains 3 tables and 2 figures.)