Toss out the six-disc changer and get on board with online music using our top 10 sites.
It’s time to give up on the record store for good. Even if you’re in love with strolling among racks and racks of CDs, the smell of vinyl, and salespeople who can tell rattle off the name of every obscure indie band ever to pass through town, the future of music undoubtedly lies online. But you don’t need to turn to the dark side of piracy (or even paying money, necessarily) to get your music fix on the Web. We’ve rounded up ten of our favorite online music destinations, each one of which offers something unique in its own right. So unplug the headphones, turn up the volume, and read on.
Any number of online music sites can deliver streaming music at the press of a button, but Pandora offers something unique: It knows what you want to hear. The entire Pandora library has been cataloged by music qualities, allowing you plug in a title or artist and hear songs in the same vein without any effort on your part. And if you want to refine the playlist, a simple thumbs up or thumbs down on songs will let Pandora further tailor its automatically generated playlists to your tastes.
Much like Pandora, Slacker offers a step above normal Web radio by giving users more control over their listening experience. It will produce playlists based on artist names or song titles, but also offers professionally produced playlists in different genres, and you can rate songs up or down in either format. The free version serves up occasional ads and allows six skips per hour, but a $4 monthly subscription eliminates both restrictions.
If you become queasy at the thought of paying for music you don’t own, or letting someone else choose your tunes for you, AmazonMP3 is hands down the best place to buy music. Unlike iTunes, which serves up DRM-protected tracks you can’t burn to CD or transfer to certain players, everything Amazon offers comes as an unprotected MP3 track. You own it and decide what to do with it.
On a sheer price-per-song basis, it’s hard to compete with eMusic, which offers songs for as low as 25 cents apiece. The catch? Unlike marketplaces like Amazon that allow users to download as much or as little as they choose, eMusic subscribers pay to get a certain number of downloads per month, essentially making it the wholesale outlet of music stores. The bigger chunk of songs you buy, the better the price (you can choose to shell out between $12 and $25 per month for plans that average out to between 40 and 25 cents per song). The library of 4.5 million songs is DRM free, meaning you can play them however you would like, but it’s also more eclectic, with less support from the major labels that sign the most popular musicians.
Studio tracks are all well and good, but if you’re looking for a quick way to check out bootlegs, music videos, fan covers and other rarities, nothing beats YouTube for sheer selection. Catch anything from bizarre fan-made Radiohead videos to epic live footage of Jimmy Hendix – for free. Third-party sites wike Muziic will even allows you to stack videos together to create playlists.
Had a song stuck in your song all day at work and just need to hear it once to get your fix? SeeqPod applies search algorithms originally intended for genetic research to MP3s, turning up results as instantly playable tracks. Better yet, you can easily arrange them into a playlist, creating queuing up a day’s worth of music, rather than listening to one-off ditties. Unfortunately, the site’s too-good-too-be-true premise might be catching up with it, since it was forced into bankruptcy by record company lawsuits at the beginning of April.
Skeptical as we were of Microsoft’s foray into online music, the Zune Pass actually offers a very good value as far as subscription music is concerned. For $15 monthly, you not only get unlimited access to the (rather impressive) Zune Pass library, you also score 10 tracks to keep for yourself. That means that even if you cancel, you’re left with a nice accumulation of music from the time you were subscribed – and for not much more than if you had bought them all individually.
Given that it’s priced about the same as the Zune Pass ($15 monthly if you want to be able to put tracks on a portable player), Rhapsody may seem like a tough sell, until you look at the size of the library. Rhapsody offers over 6 million tracks, while Microsoft is somewhere over the 3 million mark. In other words, you’re much more likely to find the rare stuff you want here.
You won’t find the local bands that play at music festivals, bars and small shows on any of these other services, but you will find them on MySpace, which has become the de facto promotion tool of choice for up-and-coming bands everywhere. Each artist page hosts a handful of free sample tracks from bands big and small, and a partnership with SnoCap even allows you to buy individual tracks from albums you might never get a chance to buy in person. The social networking aspect of the site also makes it easy to jump from band to band and hunt down new music based on what you already enjoy.
Somewhere between the randomness of discovering new music on the radio and the tediousness of researching new bands manually lies Last.fm. The site automatically keeps track of what you’re listening to on its player to both recommend more music you might like, and to let other users know what’s popular. Even better, you can view commentary on individual tracks to read what other people think about the tracks you know and love.
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