Whether you use Spotify, iTunes or Jamendo for your music fix, we all know there are a myriad of services to choose from. From recommendation players to social networks to radio players and more. Below we list a few, but not all. Some bigger, some smaller, some more prominent and well funded, others new and quirky. Only time will tell who will survive and how the music industry will come out of this “free for all” period. In the meantime, enjoy the music!
Lets start with our favorite service,
SPOTIFY
Spotify is a proprietary peer-to-peer music streaming service that allows instant listening to specific tracks or albums with almost no buffering delay. Music can be browsed by artists, albums or created playlists as well as by direct searches. Although, due to the system’s DRM, it is not possible to save the streamed music for use outside the application; a link is provided to allow the listener to directly purchase the material via partner retailers. The service is currently only available in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the United Kingdom, France and Spain. Users can access around 4.5 million tracks via searching for artists, albums, titles, labels and genres. Spotify features a large and constantly growing library of music, giving users access to tracks from all major labels as well as numerous independent labels
PANDORA
If you are in the US you can take advantage of this service which was lauched in July 2005. Its a music recommendation service, with high quality 128Kbps audio streams, and is mainly advertising supported. Business Model: Get 40 hours free music for free per month, or pay 99 cents for unlimited monthly music, or $36 for one year unlimited service.
LAST.FM
If you are one of the 3million visitors per day, you know about Last.fm - a fantastic social music community platform launched in 2002.. Its a recommendation service, like Pandora, only that it analyses not only your music but that of your friends - and suggests music that is in tune with your community likes and dislikes. Business Model: free for US, UK or Germany. Outside those territoris you can listen to a free 30-track trial or subscribe for $3/month unlimited radio streaming.
DEEZER
Deezer, formally known as BlogMusik, is a french-based recommendation search engine. The SmartRadio element of the site is an “intelligent radio” that generates 3 hours of continuous music based on one of your preferred track!
FINETUNE
FineTune is an Adobe Air social recommendation application. They have a cool Finetune Wii Project , and a desktop, iPhone and Facebook application.
ILIKE.COM
iLike is a cool recommendation service, recently acquired by MySpace for about 20million dollars. iLike is the dominant music application on the Facebook, Orkut, hi5 and Bebo platforms. With more than 50 million registered users, iLike helps people share music recommendations, playlists, and personalized concert alerts. The iLike Sidebar for iTunes and Windows Media Player suggests new music, creates automatic playlists, and connects people through music.
AMIE STREET
Here music fans can discover independent music, and determine the price of their music. Artists can upload their music to Amie Street for promotion and sale. Users form social networks with friends, listen to, and purchase music. All songs are DRM-free in MP3. Songs appear to be at 192kpbs quality level, although it may just be whatever the artist uploads. All songs are free to start. Prices fluctuate over time based on demand for the song – currently the highest priced song, “Against the Wall” by Danny Ross, is $0.36. 273 songs have been uploaded so far. This demand based pricing model seems like a good way to sell music. Artists keep 70% of proceeds after $5 in sales. They are not required to sell their music exclusively through Amie Street, and can remove it at any time.
JAMENDO
Jamendo has an extensive catalog of music under the Creative Commons Licenses worldwide. All the tracks are free to download, its available in seven languages and has an iPhone app thats cool (and free!). At decent rates, 1448 artists and 35357 tracks are available for multimedia projects or as background music for businesses
SOUNDCLOUD
SoundCloud is a community service, allows you to receive, send and distribute music. The quality is high, and a free account allows you to upload 5 tracks per month. They also have a pro page that allows you to get a more extensive plan for your needs.
THESIXTYONE
This is a social recommendation service - artists upload music, users vote, and the best music gets featured on the front page.
PROJECT PLAYLIST
ProjectPlaylist is a community based playlist service. If you register you can create and listen to unlimited playlists, and share them with social networks like facebook, AIM, Yahoo Messenger and more. You can embed playlist codes virtually anywhere. Cool service.
JOGLI
At Jogli they create the playlist for you, teh radio service generates music you like from artists you like. So its essentially a personalized radio service.
MIXTUBE
Mixtube allows you to create playlists with youtube videos. A bit rough around the edges but nice.
LALA
Lala was launched last year and allows you to listen to any song you want one time. If you want to listen to that one song more than once, then you ned to buy a 10cent “web song” license, or purchase it from iTunes and Amazon. Good pre-made user playlists and music player.
IMEEM
imeem is a social music service, enabling music fans to discover, interact and express themselves with music and playlists, and connect with other people based on shared tastes and interests.People can share their discoveries with friends on imeem and across the web in a variety of ways, from sharing links on Twitter and sending playlists by email to embedding playlists on their blogs or social networking profiles. Its an advertising supported service.
MAESTRO.FM
Maestro is a new web-based social music platform that provides you with free streaming access to your entire music collection, from any web browser anywhere and anytime, plus the ability to listen to playlists and songs from music lovers everywhere.
JANGO
Create your own custom radio stations and share them with your friends. Its an automatic service based on one track, but you can customize it further.
RADIOBETA
Radiobeta gives you access to radio stations around the world.
THERADIO
Create your own radio or find channel listings available of music you like.
AUPEO
Aupeo is a radio recommendation engine, allowing you to listen to music based on radio stations, an artist, mood and more. The “mood” area choosing music for you based on your chosen mood - happy, dramatic, melancholic, energetic, danceable, fun, stressful, aggressive, relaxing, calm
MUGASHA
Mugasha makes it really easy to listen to Electronic Music podcasts and long sets from world famous DJs. They see themselves as the Hulu.com for some of the most popular dance music sets in the world. They “chop up” the sets to enable users to easily skip and browse through the songs in each set. DJs include: Tiesto, Markus Schulz, Andy Moor, Matt Darey, Menno de Jong, Roger Shah amongst many others!
PLAY.FM
Play.fm is a comprehensive audio database for DJ and club culture. It holds more than 12.000 DJ sets, live recordings and radio sessions that can be streamed free of charge and on-demand. DJs can upload and release studio mixes, radio sessions and event recordings themselves and check their audience statistics.
QLOUD
Qloud works very well and is real-time music search engine. Find music you like, save it, make it a favorite, share it, and more. Import your own music library, and play it from the browser.
MYSPACE MUSIC
Ofcourse, famous MySpace Music is a music hub for free music and artist pages, concert tracking, and music videos. From underground to commercial, every artists is on here.
BLIP.FM
The first ever service that allows people to send tracks to twitter, Blip is a great way to discover and share new music. You can use this service whether or not you ave Twitter, which is also good considering that there ARE people not using twitter! (believe it or not)
TWISTEN.FM
Very similar to Blip.
8TRACKS
8Tracks allows you to create a playlist, publish it and share it.
JAMGLUE
Jamglue allows you to share and remix music (all tracks under the Creative Commons Licenses).
RANDOMS TO CHECK OUT:
GROOVESHARK
FUNNEL
These are only some the players in the industry these days, some bigger than others, some more established than others. What do you think? Have we missed a key player?
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