I’m a Web fanatic, I admit. But you probably already knew that… My work environment has been completely web based for years now. The same applies to my music. Like many people, I used to download music from Kazaa or eMule (Yeah, I know some of you still do). Most of the time now, I listen to music on the web and don’t have any need to download it. My laptop benefits the most from this inclination since it’s not weighed down by music files, thus saving me tons of space and virus headaches (you eMule users know what I’m talking about). Anyhow, if I do choose to download music, I can always do it over at iTunes or my favorite place in the web: Jamendo.
Music plays a large role in our lives. Since the web now plays an even bigger part, combining the two together has become unavoidable. The greatest thing about this powerful duo is that you don’t need to spend a lot of time searching for music you like — just use this nifty guide list and you’ll find just about everything you need to enjoy hours of good music. The sound quality changes from service to service, but overall, it’s good enough for regular web usage.
Please note that this is a list of services that you can use over the net without the need to download anything to your computer. This is why I’m not listing any P2P software: i.e., Spotify, as well the fact that most of us can’t really test it or use it for all that matter. This is also only the first half of this guide; part two will include more web music players (including MySpace Music, Streamzy, and others) as well as music search engines and services that make it easy to share songs on Twitter and other social sites.
Music Recommendations:
Pandora is a service that can be used only in a specific locale, this one being within the U.S. Luckily, I had the chance to test the service when it was first released and became available to everyone. Launched way back in July 2005, the project had been in the initial testing phases for five years prior to launch date. Pandora recommends music to you by matching similar musical attributes. All you really need to do is choose an artist or a band you like, and Pandora will do the rest. Pandora delivers high quality 128Kbps audio streams, offering recommendations similar to the artists you have chosen. Pandora’s player looks like a radio, you can open up to 100 stations and navigate through them quickly. Registering for Pandora will provide you with a free account (advertising-supported). Free Pandora accounts will play up to  40 hours of music for free per month, you also have the option to pay 99 cents for unlimited listening hours for the rest of that month, or pay $36 to upgrade Pandora for one year. If you want to download music from Pandora, you can do it through iTunes or Amazon. You can see our past Pandora coverage here.
With almost 3 million unique visitors a day, Last.fm is one of the most powerful social music communities on the Web today. Like Pandora, the service allows you to enjoy music that you like, but unlike Pandora, Last.fm analyses what you and your friends listen to and like, and then suggests more music based on that analysis. When you recommend music to a friend or you tag it, or you write about it, or simply just listen to it – you shift the song’s importance on the site, and will in turn get recommended to more people. Based on the music you’ve already listened to, Last.fm will recommend new music you might like, as well as suggest other users with a similar music taste to yours, which you might be interested in friending, and you can also easily communicate with them. If you live outside the U.S., U.K. or Germany, you can listen with a free 30-track trial or subscribe for a low price of $3/month for unlimited radio streaming. (Launched in 2002!)
This is how BlogMusik, looked in 2006, and this is how Deezer (formerly BlogMusik) looks today – pretty impressive change, don’t you think? The French-based service is one of the largest and happens to also be a very successful music recommendation search engine. Once registered here, you can create your personal profile and reach the Deezer community. You can create playlists, send messages to your contacts, leave comments, add artists and albums to your favorites, and more. But here’s what I like the most – The SmartRadio, which is an intelligent radio that automatically generates 3 hours(!) of continuous listening based on one artist – completely free. Priceless! You can see our past coverage of Deezer here.
I think the first Adobe AIR application that I ever tried was Finetune. Finetune provides you with the most interesting new playlists of related music from your choice of artists. Besides the site’s community where you can browse, listen to music, create a profile, connect with other users and more, Finefune also has some cool feautures to complete their suite, and each tool gives you an extraordinary music experience. Take for example the Finetune Wii project (which can be played also over the web), it’s a great sight and sound for the eyes and ears. Just enter an artist’s name and Finetune will create a playlist with similar music that will play for hours. Best of all it’s free, and you also get an iPhone, Facebook and a Desktop app that all sync with your music playlist, no matter where you play it from. You can see our past coverage of FineTune here.
Also worth mentioning in this same topic group are, of course: Ilike.com (acquired by Myspace), and music.strands.tv
Independent Music:
Amie Street is a home for musicians. The service allows music fans to discover new and independent music. Visitors at the site can search for new music based on genre, region, or recommendations. Fans can also search for music according to its price -Â Amie Street is actually the only marketplace where listeners determine the price of the music. How does it work? Every song is originally priced free or very inexpensive and increases in price, up to 98 cents, as more and more users purchase it. Musicians then get 70% of the revenue from each sale. Additionally, Amie Street matches you with music that you might like, for example: I couldn’t locate Coldplay on the site, but I got more than 70 results that sound similar to the band. Obviously, this exposes me to music that I’ve never heard before, which is always a welcomed experience. You can see our past coverage of Amie Street here.
Why is Jamendo one of my favorite music services? It offers the largest catalog of music under Creative Commons licenses – worldwide. And, not only are all of the albums free to download, there’s also a large chance you won’t know any of the artists. If you already have an open mind about music, surely it won’t stop you from listening to some new albums, right? The best way to find music at this site is to search by the genre tags. Found something that you like? You can review, comment, rate, share and as I’ve said download it for free. The service is available in seven languages, and has an iPhone app that you can download for free. Business model? Yes they have one too.
SoundCloud is by far the best looking music application there is today. It offers a great interface, a great user-experience and above these all, great music! SoundCloud lets music professionals receive, send and distribute their music. The service allows professionals (and non-professionals) to exchange, and follow music and musicians at the site. It’s a full community where people can easily communicate with each other based on shared tastes, but it is also a place where musicians can store and showcase their music using high quality standards. With the free account, you can only upload 5 tracks maximum per month, but if you are an industry fanatic and you find this plan to be somewhat lacking, you can check the pro page for packages that are more suitable to your needs. See our past coverage here.
TheSixtyOne allows artists to upload their songs and lets thousands of listeners decide whether they like it or not. The most popular songs hit the front page. Think about it as a Digg for music, the more people heart a song, the higher it goes. The site connects musicians and fans, giving them all the tools to communicate with each other. For artists, it’s good place to promote their work. For anyone else, it’s a wonderful place to discover and support new music.
Create & Listen to Playlist:
I’ve never been very much of a Project Playlist fan, but I have to say it’s a good service. Ultimately, it’s a community based on playlists. You don’t have to register to be able to listen to the music, but once you do, you can start building your playlist and enjoy more features such as the Playlist IM, which is a chat system similar to Facebook where you can connect your ‘playlist’ friends or even friends from AIM, Facebook, Yahoo Messenger, etc. What else? You can write blog entries, upload photos, privately connect with other members, browse thousands of other music playlists, comment, share, and much more. My guess is that people use this site mostly to share their playlist on their blog/site or social network. Playlist allows you to grab a playlist code and embed it anywhere you want. One thing that bugs me though is that the member’s search feature is missing. Today, when everything is so connected to your identity, this is a must have feature. On the other hand, I was impressed to see they saved my playlist from 2006…
Jiwa.fm allows you to create personalize playlist and share it in the Jiwa.fm community or with friends & family. As a member, you are able to share, exchange, and explore music. You can also expand your tastes with the SmartRadio tool. I found this service to be unique in a way because no matter what you are doing at the site, it won’t prevent you from listening to your playlist, it just plays in the background. Amazingly, when you click on an artist from within a mixed artists playlist, it will automatically create an album playlist of that artist. You might find the site to be a bit cluttered at first time, but once you get it, it works like a charm – highly recommended.
At Jogli, you don’t really need to create a playlist – they create it for you. Think about it as a giant web-based CD store where you can search for an artist, see all of his/her albums, and then listen to them exactly as listed in original CDÂ Let’s take Michael Jackson for example: Here you can find all his discography, and listen to his CDs one by one. Clicking on the button ‘Play Radio’ will open a radio station generated from music you might like from similar artists. As a registered member, you are able to save playlists, write reviews, and more. You can also import your playlists to Last.fm or iTunes to make it a video playlist. Check out our past coverage of Jogli here.
MixTube would have been better and easier if they allowed you to search for Youtube videos on their site to create a playlist. But no, you have to supply them with a Youtube URL, which means, you’ll have to go directly to Youtube, search for a song, then copy-paste that song URL back into MixTube. Thus, I found it to be frustrating. But looking at the bright side, you can always search for someone else’s playlist, and save yourself time and agony. One word about the Youtube music integration – lots of services use it, but unfortunately, it doesn’t offer you much control of your playlist, and what plays today, may not play tomorrow..
Lala is another great music store/playlist maker that we’ve covered extensively since the site relaunched last year. It allows users to listen to any song they want one time. If you want to listen to a song more than that, you buy a 10 cent ‘web song’ that lets you stream the song from the cloud as many times as you want (you can also purchase a full download of the song as you would from iTunes or Amazon). The site has a great integrated music player and a variety of pre-made playlists built by other users.
Worth mentioning: Imeem, and Maestro.fm
Music Visualization:
There’s no doubt in my mind that Musicovery has a strong following of avid users. The site is an interactive and personalized webradio enabling its users to generate in a few clicks a musical program adapted to the various listening situations and their preferences. Their unique mood matrix proposes a relationship between music and mood in an ergonomic and attractive manner. I’ve submitted this item about the service to Digg in 2006 and it’s good to see the site still works . But things have changed. You have limited navigation if you’re not a pro user ($15/3 months or $48/12 months), but once you are – the sky is the limit. In any case, this service will blow you away.
CitySounds.fm is perhaps just a mashup site, but it’s a good one! CitySounds.fm collects music from SoundCloud and pictures from Flickr to create a wonderful music experience from a single page. You can listen to the latest music from cities all around the world. At the top are the most active cities and the list is constantly changing as new music is being created.
Web-Radio:
Very similar to Last.fm in concept, Jango allows you to create your own custom radio stations and share them with friends. Just type in what you want to hear – and your station will immediately play the music you want along with similar favorites of other Jango users who share your tastes. You can customize your stations further by adding more artists and rating songs. Each artist get a page, containing the web-radio, the music playlist, biographies, events list, comments from members at the site, and fan list for easy communication. The service claims to be legal and says it pays royalties due to all labels/artists every time a song is played. Moreover, Jango runs a program called Jango Airplay. This program gives emerging artists an unprecedented opportunity to be proactively exposed to the millions of visitors at the site. See our past coverage of Jango here.
RadioBeta is an efficient way to locate radio stations in your area or around the globe. You can search stations by geography, genre, band, language or tags. You can listen without signing up, or you can log in and create your personal dashboard with favorite stations that you can then listen to on a daily basis. We mostly hear radio on the go, but now you can easily track your favorite radio stations on the web. All the radio stations are public so you aren’t asked to pay anything to use the site.
OK, TheRadio is also one of my favorites because of its simplicity. Entering an artist or a genre gets you custom channel, but if you go over the channel listing, you will find much more interesting suggestions. I don’t know about you but I actually like when someone else picks the music as long is it in the range of my request. Anyway, TheRadio does a great job on finding music that I like – it simply works.
Aupeo fits in the Recommendation list as well as this category. The service lets you experience music in a fours different ways: by Stations, Artist, Mood, and Personal. The Stations area is pretty limited if you don’t have a pro account, but you can still get the feel of it. In the Artist zone, you enter your favorite name and choose from a variety stations suggested. The coolest way is the Mode area, which plays music based on your chosen mode. These stations are created by music experts, says Aupeo. The Personal station streams music based on your music behavior at the site. Overall, very intensive and powerful!
Worth mentioning: Tun3r, Mugasha, and Play.fm
That’s it for Part 1 of this music guide. If you have any other suggestions related to these groups, you are more than welcome to add them in the comments. In the next part of this post, I’ll offer the best options for Music search engines, Music web-players, Twitter-Music craziness, and more. Stay tuned!
Image by RossinaBossioB on Flickr.
….what about 8tracks.com!! awesome site, with last.fm integration!!!! (or is it comming in vol.2?)….
Grooveshark, too ?
Grooveshark rocks! I would have thought it would have been included here. It has a recomendation feature like Pandora, but it isnt as acurate. It really shines because you can listen to any track as many times as you want in a row, on demand. The same company also has a cool short-linking service that provides bit.ly-like links, but to songs, not web pages.
I agree. Grooveshark is an obvious no show on this list.
Hype machine?!? http://hypem.com
jamWee??? http://www.jamwee.com
Ugh, those people spammed the hell out of the TC comments and their product sucks. It’s like last.fm and twitter but worse than both!
Blip.fm? http://blip.fm ?
Jamendo is great, thanks!
blip is fantastic!
Hype Machine is fantastic! I can’t believe it didn’t make the list.
fan funding tools? artists raise money from their fanbase to record music. it’s the best way that a fan can support an artist!
mybandstock.com
Check Volume 2, it’s in there. Sadly, not as good as the original MuxTape.
I’ve personally used Jango to promote a single that I’ve recently released and absolutely love the community over there.
As an emerging artist, I can definitely attest to the usefulness of these services. I can get great promotion with a low cost. And cost, as you can guess, is definitely a factor for most indie artists.
My main concern for some of these services, such as Pandora, is that you may at times require a physical release in order to be considered for airplay (netplay?). While I can imagine this cuts back on illegitimate releases stealing netplay (airplay?), it’s most definitely a setback for artists like myself, who have embraced digital releases as a primary format for release.
Great compilation. Impressive.
For those that still want to download the music to their machine (or sync to iPod or whatever), I still recommend StationRipper – still records old-style internet radio, but also downloads newer ones like Pandora, Last.fm, etc.
No mention of Lala.com?!!!!!
see above in the list
No mention of Lala + Firefox + DownloadHelper?
It is sad that Pandora is only available in US. I got to know about it when I was visiting US two years back and was hooked to it through out my stay there. I was amazed by the quality of their recommendations plus I discovered artists I hadn’t been following previously. Waiting for Pandora to go live in the rest of the world
I absolutely loved pandora when it was available in the UK. Sigh.
Totally agree. Great post but while this list would not have been half as long 5 years ago, it remains confounding when these services (eg Pandora) are not available outside the US. If labels are serious about digital music (and combating piracy) they would do well to remember that the first W in WWW means World – not just North America … otherwise Kazaa and eMule (or more likely their contemporary equivalents) will remain the tools of choice.
http://www.piracypayback.org/
Pandora is my favorite.
Seriously? No Lala.com?
It must be “Everyone Gets Selective Blindness Saturday” or something.
You should add http://www.beatbuggy.com to the list for artists looking for instrumentals or music producers to produce their albums.
I have tried most of these and I think they all fail. The problem is that no matter how good software gets at guessing what you are going to want to listen to next, it will get it wrong. Unless of course you are a predictable sheep that is afraid to think for themselves when it comes to music? Do you really need someone to tell you what you should like? I don’t. No matter if it a human or a piece of software, no one knows what I want to listen to next except me.
The other problem is when you are offline. I work in buildings that do not get a good enough signal to stream data like that. So I need the actually MP3 files.
I have yet to see these problems solved just yet, but I do hold out hope someday. So far they are not even close. People change programs left and right because none of them work. That’s why you need so many of them.
I’m not so sure that they’re trying to guess what you *want* to listen to next. Rather, they’re attempting to find music that you might like to hear.
It has nothing to do with being ’sheep’.
I think you pretty much missed the point of the -entire- article. Here are the tldr; notes for you: web-music that you DON’T have to download to conserve hard drive space. You also might take notice to the title: “Your Guide To Music On The Web”
Also, I hardly agree that having a website make suggestions in the same genre a person is listening to makes them a sheep. It’s called expanding your music horizons, not being a close-minded control freak.
P.S. The Web is “Online”
I don’t think it’s telling you what you should like, rather it’s making recommendations based on previously expressed preferences, just as you would recommend a book, a restaurant, a film, etc, to a friend, based on what you know of their likes and dislikes.
This is an extremely comprehensive list. Looking forward to part two. thanks.
Slacker is ok as well.
Agreed. I highly recommend Slacker.
+1
The lack of slacker.com on this list pretty much negates any value it might have had.
I’d say Slacker is more than just okay. Great even.
Much more “control” over your custom stations than Pandora or Last.fm including settings for popularity (Fringe, Familiar, etc), age (Classic, Current, etc) and more.
On top of that they’ve got dozens of professionally programmed “satellite-style” stations that are as good if not better than the “real” satellite stations and certainly better (more breadth, more depth) than terrestrial radio.
Lefsetz, perhaps said it best in comparing Slacker to Pandora, “Pandora SUCKS!”
http://lefsetz....ker-vs-pandora/
Speaking of custom Slacker stations, if you like jambands at all you might like the station I put together for my music site. It’s embedded here:
http://jamtopia.com/streams/
Slacker stations take a little longer to “dial-in” than Pandora, but the payoff, for me at least, is worth it. And if you’re lazy, just hit play on one of their stations and be on your way.
TL
Looks like Slacker has a “love it / ban it” binary rating system. I hate that; it assumes that I will either love or despise everything I hear.
I am more into the music video thing. And here http://www.putpat.tv ist doing a great job. Love that service!!!
What about grooveshark.com
Totally concur – http://www.8tracks.com/ belongs on here.
Blogs are also essential to music discovery. More often that not, the aggregators like Pandora or Last.fm recommend music that doesn’t fit person’s music tastes The algorithm is too general.
If you’re a crate digger you seek underground for the best stuff. Right now, blogs are my destination for finding new and undiscovered gems. Part of the fun is finding it first and then watching that new artist or track get big.
I’ve found auto-recommendations don’t really work for me, but I’ve also found that when I find new artists I want to try I usually find they’ve got quite a few releases out and I either have to pick and choose carefully. Sometimes hitting something I love, sometimes not and giving up on the artist all together.
With me and my friends experiencing this situation quite a bit I decided to make a website to try and help, it’s called Where to Start With (http://wheretostartwith.com/) and although in very early beta it has helped me find one new awesome artist that is now in my regular rotation.
I’d love it if any of you guys checked it out, like I say it’s still in early beta and there are some great additions coming up soon (think friends-related features).
I like the idea. Good luck.
At a glance, I love this idea. I’m not familiar with all the sites in this article, so I don’t know how close anyone else has come to this idea, but I hope it sticks. I’ve found myself many times looking into an artist and trying to figure out either where to start or what to get next. It makes complete sense to use the power of community to help with those recommendations.
You should check out Grooveshark
…and http://www.tunewiki.com … perfect for music and lyrics
Awdio.com is another one I would add to the live music streaming.
Orli: I’d like to throw MashLogic into the mix, especially for your upcoming post on Music Search Engines. Technically, we provide Music Discovery by automatically linking the names of artists & bands on web pages to streaming content, merchandise, etc.
In fact you can install the TechCrunch Edition of MashLogic by clicking on the button in the Subscribe bar at the top right of this page, in front of Twitter.
Awesome coverage! Thanks a lot.
I’m a jamendo fan. Like to discover lovely indie artists there. And also, i have a music project called Tymphony. I publish all my albums as freely downloadable http://www.jame...artist/Tymphony I’m very happy about that. Gathering feedback & reviews… Just what i want.
Nice guide. Looking forward to part 2.
Don’t forget to mention Spotify and/or Grooveshark there!
4g Will provide anything with 108mbps if i remmeber all right. Then all going to have hd streaming abillity from their phone to a hd projektor. Did anyone burned cds and dvds with music just to store it? Ofc you did have you ever used them cds /dvds ? “dont talk about ur car stereo talking about ur backups. … Yeah right you have maybe used 1 -3 of them backups u did of ur music. That is whats going to happend with ur hdds soon. As yoo will have streaming abillity on anything big enough for a battery cell.
Take care
m00ns
Bonuses
http://friendfeed.com/m00ns
http://www.mysp...rowlingmachines
Enjoy
Why on earth is Imeem.com not on this list? Although the interface is not perfect, Imeem and Pandora are the two best services. Imeem lets you listen to any song that you want, immediately.
Its a great service and I love it?
Whats the deal Orli? Did you just forget while you wrote the post?
The recommendations on streaming sites are pretty useless for the most part. No one can make a better decision on what you want to play Next, than you yourself. Considering the fact that some of us listen to different genres and styles of music (much like myself), most of these software’s/algorithms may never be able to read our minds and know what were thinking next.
This is a great list. Tons of sites I’ve never heard of and I plan on checking them all out. Thanks.
Hope you are including MOG in part 2! http://mog.com
Orli, this is a great list, thanks!
Have you come across http://thefeelgood.com ?
It has a very small but loyal following and users are limited to posting only one song per day, so they really try to put up music that other users will appreciate. I’d love to hear what you think about it.
Music + Life Experiences = http://www.jamsbio.com
worth a look.
Grooveshark.com definitely needs to be on there.
But ya, I also have my whole life web-based. It’s great. If my computer broke, I wouldn’t be out of anything at all. lol
My favorites are lala.com for when I wanna buy music, grooveshark when I need to see if I like something or not, and last.fm for everything else.
Wanted to check in to address a misguided internet user in the earlier comments, and to say Thank You!
This is a nice compilation for those of us who are looking for web-music alternatives. Perhaps some of the user suggestions will make it into Part #2 with summaries? Looking forward to it.
Why leave out Spotify? In Europe at least, it’s competing with all these web-based services – it seems like a rather arbitrary distinction to leave it out.
Don’t sleep on Googs, ya’ll.
http://tr.im/wUoo
heu … hypemachine ? … fairtilizer ?
I adore last.fm the day the radio was free. But not anymore as they charge the users.
The one to be blamed is the company who bought them. The harsh painful money-making corporate minded people who took the last.fm’s shine.
Don’t sleep on jamWee
those guys have put a lot of work in that site. I’m a beta tester
Why make a distinction for music services you have to download a client from; because part 2 of your copy will be:
“services you have to download a client from are not bad but not as good as services you do not have to download a client from”.
CC music is directly proportional to Copyrighted music, the distnction has become ever so blured,
All I am saying is what can your copy (part 2 web music players) reveale by way of a download clients that it cannot reveale without a download client as in this copy, (part 1your guide to music on the web).
i heart MOG (www.mog.com) for editorial music info
Which ones of these work in the most countries; for people who travels alot its only good if it works in more than 5 countries unlike some services otherwise your back to downloading.
Hype Machine? Band Camp? Grooveshark? KCRW?
They’re all doomed.
Who pays who? Does anybody pay anything?
THere are a number of different business models… first of all think of normal radio: advertising clearly works and a number of these services are ad supported. Due to the way web users can be ad targeted individually based on their tastes, the advertising has the potential to be *more* lucrative than traditional radio!
Then you’ve got systems like Jamendo, where the business model is advertising, merchandise and professional licensing: 3 different solid income streams that take something free (Creative Commons Free) and turn it into revenue for the benefit of everyone!
Problem is that online music sites like last.fm use bandwidth, of which here in Australia we don’t have much of so it is going to affect our download limit like there is no tomorrow.
I would rather go out and buy a CD and then rip it with itunes or just put the CD into my cd changer and do it that way.
May be for a change you should try http://www.clownbasket.com. This must be a good place for emerging artist to get their word out there. Some of the songs are really good and some are like bar singers. Still give a try.
what about iMeem? You stream music for free and get to choose what you want to listen to…entire albums, catalogs or make your own playlist and listen to other users’ playlists…also gives artist bios and tour schedules and options to buy and download…it’s the best music site out there
Instead of a list I’d love more separation based on unique apporaches to discovering music: Amie street, Hypem, and 8tracks are not your same old.
And as long as we are talking unique don’t forget music games as discovery — Jam Legend and Loudcrowd.
I love music! Thanks for these wonderful resources. Will definitely check them out..
I thing you forgot to talk about http://www.beezik.com, it s a new french website that allows to download wma tracks for free and legaly … you only have to watch a 20sec commercial before.
The only problem is that it is not DRM free and downloaded music is not comaptible with ipod/iphone … soon maybe !
I like amie.st but I still think eMusic is a better product all around. It has a much richer catalog (and Sony’s 2+ old back catalog has really upped its depth and quality), is generally cheaper than amie.st for the better music and is equally well designed as a website. I use both but always default to amie.st barring the rare instances when amie.st is cheaper or has certain songs available that eMusic doesn’t.
I personally love lala.com – The only problem I have with it is the fact you can only stream a song once. Plus I often find they lack songs. I hate the say it but myspace music is pretty amazing. Only if they improved their interface, less ads, and a better player.
I think they can create a new category “live music” and include “http://www.awdio.com/” in this one..
yes they can as Awdio already offer to 100% Live Music 24/7
ten days ago i listened to Questlove (the Roots) from Sutra in NYC and it was huge!!!