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 - 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 CD 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.
