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The era of listening to any song, at any moment, in any location is fast approaching. While we're not quite there yet, a handful of on-demand music web services have come close.
Musicovery
Musicovery is an interesting service that is trying to quantify certain music with moods. So if you are for example in a Happy Mood it may suggests songs such as Huey Lewis and the News – and if you are feeling glum, maybe something more slit your wrists esq. Perhaps not a great idea if you are on the verge of a breakdown. Apart from that obvious caveat, the service also has a quite genius Itunes plugin for Mac OS (only) – which creates new playlists in a similar way to Genius for Itunes – except for your mood.
In much the same way as Just Hear It does, Jogli utilises YouTube videos as a source for audio. Allowing you to then signup, login and save the playlists. A simple concept that works really well, especially if you know what you want to hear. If on the other hand you enjoy getting suggestions and sourcing new sounds, its probably not for you.
Blip.fm
In a nutshell, blipfm is a Twitter service for music lovers. Whilst Twitter allows you to post what you are doing- blip allows you to post what you are listening to, and is a perfect compliment to the Twitter service for music lovers.
Just Hear It
Just hear it is a flash based web application that literally allows you to search for any song in the world. Whilst the interface is impressive, the responsiveness of the service was not. It uses the Youtube API (amongst other services) heavily to find videos with music content, and then in turn stream via its interface. The service is in private beta, and members gain the advantage of creating playlists of their content. Perhaps when its released to the public it will perform better.
Imeem
Imeem lets you start playing your chosen tracks immediately without actually signing up to anything, which is a nice touch if you want to listen to just one particular track. Although it does play other tracks from the same artist once they are finished. Signing in does give you access to creating your own playlists, that you can share and embed with friends, and it makes a bold claim that it is the largest social network for music lovers on the web.
Jango
Jango offer an extremely easy to use interface for listening to music through the browser. Simply type your artist in away she goes. As with Imeem, listening to tracks is available without much hassle, although in order to save your favourite stations you do have to signup. Streaming was smooth, and some of the social features are similar to some of the other services mentioned. Jango allows users to subscribe to each others stations, which provides you with a good chance of finding like on like artists. The site is funded via advertising and offers the opportunity to purchase via Amazon or Itunes.
The Hype Machine
The Hype Machine is traditional blog, turned into a source of new audio, and artists. Created by Anthony Volodkin it is offers aggregated content from various mp3 blogs from around the web and offers a fresh daily dose of new sounds to tantalise your auditory taste buds. It basically is a delicious for music – and delicious it is. If you are music blogger discovery new talent, then the Hype Machine is where you should be aggregating to- to gain further traffic.
Maestro Fm
Maestro Fm offer more social playlist sharing features with their offering. You can perform a wide variety of tasks including getting recommended playlists as you listen, finding playlists for your favorite artists and the social rating of your playlists.
ShoutCast
If any of you used to use WinAmp, you will undoubtadly have come across shoutcast in the past. Nullsoft initially developed shoutcast as a way for artists to broadcast live streaming files over the web at a fraction of the cost than traditional am / fm radios, and the service has taken off phenomenally now hosting over 20,000+ internet radio stations. You can easily logon to the shoutcast site, and listen to any internet radiostation that tickles your fancy. Some media players use Shoutcast’s servers inside their hardware to offer internet radio.
Youtify
Youtify gives you the ability to easily find all the artists you want and play the videos in playlist format. For example you can search for ‘Radiohead’, and if satisfied with the results returned, just let it sit and play the automated selection of music.
Alternatively, if there are songs you aren’t a big fan of, make your own playlist easily, and share with others. Instead of the video taking the main focus of the interface, as is the case with Youtube – Youtify instead focusses on the playlist. You can drag and drop songs from search to create digital mixtapes, and using browser cookies, when you return to the site, everything is automatically saved as you left it. Youtube Playlists can also be searched, giving you access to curated content from other YouTube users that may share the same musical taste.
With all of this running in the browser and needing no login process to use, it’s a great way to discover new artists via other users of the service, and provides a great Spotify alternative that you’ll enjoy using.
Grooveshark (Web-based, Free)
Price: $6/month for no ads, $9/month mobile access
Library Size: Undisclosed
Bitrate Quality: Varies
Platforms: Web, iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone 7, Palm
Library Size: Undisclosed
Bitrate Quality: Varies
Platforms: Web, iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone 7, Palm
When you're ready to listen to some tunes online, Grooveshark allows you to
jump right in. Unlike many services that require a subscription to use, Grooveshark
lets you search for music and build a playlist as soon as the site loads. If
you want to save the playlist, however, and access other session enhancing
features like flagging songs to enable the music suggestion service, you'll
need an account. Aside from manually building a playlist, you can also listen
to Grooveshark Radio, their suggestion engine. One of Grooveshark's most unique
features is that if you can't find a song or artist you love, you can upload
the music from your own collection to build the Grooveshark database.
Spotify (Windows/Mac/Mobile/Web-based;
Basic: Free/Premium: €9.99 month)
Spotify has the largest
offering of songs and does much of what the above services do. But it also has
a pair of killer features: it offers a free desktop streaming subscription
(unlimited streaming for now, but will be reduced to 10 hours/month in six
months), and its desktop app allows you to merge your local files with
Spotify's streaming content under one roof. When you sync your mobile with your
computer, all of this is funneled into the mobile app, creating a seamless
music experience. Best of both worlds. That said, the lack of a web-based
interface, barely adequate mobile app and strange design quirks will have some
running for the Rdio hills.
Pandora (Web-based;
Basic: Free/Premium: $36 per year)
Pandora is the easy-to-use front end for the massive database of attributes
generated by the Music
Genome Project. The Music Genome Project analyzes songs with up to
400 different attributes so when you tell Pandora "Play me something like
the song Punkrocker by The Teddy Bears featuring Iggy Pop" it doesn't just
return a song that people who liked "Punkrocker" also liked—it
returns a song that is also "genetically" related to your suggestion.
Pandora may not have the most bells and whistles of the music sharing services
rounded up today, but the power of the Music Genome Project and ease with which
you can create and rate personalized streaming radio stations has won Pandora
many fans. Upgrading from free to premium service allows you to stream more
than 40 hours a month, gives you access to a dedicated desktop client, and
increases the quality of your audio stream.
Last.fm (Web-based/iPhone,
Basic: Free/Premium: $3 per month)
Last.fm is another service that not only streams music but generates
suggestions for new music based on what you like. In addition to building
playlists and enjoying tunes on the web, you can "scrobble" your own
music collection to Last.fm—which basically means you let Last.fm track the
songs you're listening to and add them to your Last.fm profile, allowing you to
both listen to them and use them to increase the scope of Last.fm's suggestion
engine for better personalized picks. In addition to listening to streaming
radio and building personalized stations, Last.fm also allows direct music
download—when authorized by the copyright holder—so you can expand your
personal collection as you listen.
Lala (Web-based,
Free with per-song fees)
Lala's claim to fame is the ease with which you can listen to both your own
music over the web and purchase new music inexpensively. Lala has a database of
8 million songs that you can listen to once for free, purchase for online play
for $0.10, or buy as a DRM-free MP3 for $0.79. If you have a song in your
personal collection—on your computer at home—you can add it to the Lala
database to allow unlimited play without paying a fee. Lala doesn't sport a
hefty music recommendation engine like some of the other contenders in the Hive
Five—although we didn't find the one they have lacking—but instead focuses more
strongly on connections between people to drive music suggestion. As a result Lala
supports easy rating and playlist sharing with friends to encourage organic
music discovery.
MOG
Price: $5/month web-only/$10/month web and mobile
Library Size: Over 11 Million
Bitrate Quality: 320kbps MP3 web streaming/320 MP3 mobile download/64kbps AAC mobile streaming
Platforms: Web, iOS, Android, Roku, Chrome
Bitrate Quality: 320kbps MP3 web streaming/320 MP3 mobile download/64kbps AAC mobile streaming
Platforms: Web, iOS, Android, Roku, Chrome
When it
comes to specs, MOG has the advantage. They have more songs than everyone except
Rhapsody and they stream at higher bitrates, which means better sound on nice
speakers and headphones. At worst, it sounds good and at best it sounds
excellent. Most of the major new releases are available on their Tuesday
release dates, and they manage to snag an occasional pre-release stream. They
also provide hand-picked album recommendations daily for those in search of new
music. The iOS
and Roku apps, if not life changing, are serviceable apps that do their job and
mostly don't between you and your music. Meanwhile, their Chrome
web app (which works in any
browser) is fantastic. It's well designed, provides plenty of visuals and big,
clickable buttons; it's blazing fast and moves from screen to screen with smooth
animations.
While all the apps are well thought-out and executed, the main site (which most people will interact with, presumably) is a mess. The search and navigation process is too text-heavy, interactive elements (like play/add buttons) can be too small, and songs play through a flash-based pop-out window, which tends to get lost amongst your other open windows. Also, the social aspect of MOG's site feels undercooked compared to Rdio. While it provides much of the same social information that Rdio provides, that info is harder to get and the presentation is lacking.
Rdio
Price: $5/month web-only/$10/month web and
mobile
Library Size: 9 million
Bitrate Quality: 256kbps MP3 web (mobile bitrate undisclosed)
Platforms: Web, Windows/OSX desktop, iOS, Android, Sonos Blackberry, Windows Phone 7
Bitrate Quality: 256kbps MP3 web (mobile bitrate undisclosed)
Platforms: Web, Windows/OSX desktop, iOS, Android, Sonos Blackberry, Windows Phone 7
Rdio's
web UI is well-designed, and navigation is silky smooth. Load a track and it
starts playing in a module on the left side of your browser window. If you hop
to another page inside Rdio, the music keeps playing without so much as a
stutter. You also have a "collection," which corrals your favorite
songs and albums. The mobile app is also a winner, combining all the social and
search elements of the web-based version with a UI that comes close to
mimicking the iOS music player (always a
good thing). Rdio is
all about simplifying the experience down to two core elements, listening and
exploration/sharing via social elements. You can add other users as friends
much like you would on Twitter. When you log in to the site, you're greeted
with a colorful mosaic of album art that either shows your most played
songs/albums, your friends' most played songs/albums, or that of the entire
Rdio network. For the casual music fan, this is a good way to stay up on not
just what's new, but also to know what the people you surround yourself with
are into.
The most glaring flaw in Rdio is streaming over 3G. While they deliver 256kbps streams over wi-fi in the browser/desktop/mobile apps, the 3G streams are of a lower quality that the company will not disclose. The difference is noticeable. They also have a smaller library than MOG and Rhapsody, which isn't a total inconvenience when it comes to the big, current releases. But when you start digging through the back catalogues of older musicians and more obscure/independent releases, you might have (a bit) more luck with MOG or Rhapsody.
Rhapsody
Price: $10/monthLibrary Size: 12 Million
Bitrate Quality: 128kbps MP3 web/64kbps MP3 mobile
Platforms: Web, iOS, Android, WIndows Mobile, Blackberry, Connected TVs
Well, Rhapsody
has more songs than anyone else, and they're available on more devices and
platforms than any other service. From there, however, everything goes
downhill.
Streaming Rhapsody from the web sucks. Everything from the page design to UI elements to overall responsiveness sucked (it also borderline fails to work in Chrome). Rhapsody also doesn't offer the same type of social element that Rdio or even MOG offers. They have a social element to some degree, but it's so limited in functionality and hard to find that it's borderline useless.
On top
of that, if you use anything better than stock computer speakers or cheap
earbuds, the audio is noticeably inferior. You hear a lot of static while
streaming, which shouldn't come as a huge shock, since bitrate tops out
at 128kbps over wi-fi and 64kbps over 3G. Also, there's no web-only option.
Everyone pays 10 dollars whether you have a mobile device or not. And speaking
of mobile, their iOS app is certainly better than the website, but that said,
it still trails behind MOG and Rdio.
Other
Music Web Services
Archive.org Open Source Audio
The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive was founded by Brewster Kahle in 1996. It is a member of the IIPC (International Internet Preservation Consortium).
OpSound
Opsound is a gift economy in action, an experiment in applying the model of free software to music. Musicians and sound artists are invited to add their work to the Opsound pool using a copyleft license developed by Creative Commons. Listeners are invited to download, share, remix, and reimagine.
The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive was founded by Brewster Kahle in 1996. It is a member of the IIPC (International Internet Preservation Consortium).
OpSound
Opsound is a gift economy in action, an experiment in applying the model of free software to music. Musicians and sound artists are invited to add their work to the Opsound pool using a copyleft license developed by Creative Commons. Listeners are invited to download, share, remix, and reimagine.
BradSucks
Brad Sucks is the name of a one man band. All MP3′s are available for free download and can be mashed up and used in youtube videos / animations etc.
Josh Woodward
Employing the same strategy as Brad Sucks, Josh Woodward offers free albums licensed under Creative Commons.
Nine Inch Nails – Ghosts
Creative Commons
CCMixter
ccMixter is a community music site featuring remixes licensed under Creative Commons where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want.
SectionZ
An electronic music community that offers Creative Commons-licensed tracks from genres like IDM, drum ‘n’ bass, and ambient.
Audionautix
FreePD
This site currently has 19 pieces of music dedicated to the Public Domain, contributed by 1 composer.
SoundClick
SoundClick offers a search engine interface to find creative commons mp3′s.
Magnatune
I’m a big fan of the Magnatune approach to music distribution. Their offering allows you to use music in your project, whilst it is being created, then once you create something commercial, you can move to a commercial license.
Freesound
Freesound focusses only on sound, not songs, which separates it from the crowd.
Songbird
An open source music player
Mp3 Search engine
Interesting search engine – which recognises songs via humming or singing them
Songza
Songza
Music search engine
A great place to go to collect all sorts of music
metadata, including album art, editorial and customer reviews, track lists,
popularity, similar items, release dates and all that. It is possible to crawl
through the Amazon catalog and collect information on thousands of CDs (and
books and DVDs for that matter) in the course of a week or so. (Amazon does
request that you limit your requests to no more than one per second.)
Artistopia is site for
independent music on the Internet providing a home to thousands of bands, musicians,
singers and songwriters the world over. The site provides a professional
presentation of the artist to the industry. Providing a web service for music webmasters and music businesses,
commissions are a paid per action every time a visitor from your site becomes a
new member of the Artistopia community. The more that member upgrades their
membership, the more revenue can generated.
A place for Chinese music lovers sharing tastes with friends
The GigJunkie API has simple
queries to enable powerful global concert searches with a range of filters
including geolocation, genre and date ranges.
Jamendo is a repository of
2000+ free albums under Creative Commons licenses. They have an open API you
can use to fetch music or playlists.
Is a free music notification service that focuses on
simple subscription and setup. You can subscribe to a list of your favorite
artists and receive an email whenever one of these artists has a new release.
It is based on the extensive MusicBrainz-database
with over 570.000 artists.
MusicMobs is playlist sharing and social tagging
/ recommendation music site. The site is built entirely on
top of its public webservices API. This means that anything that MusicMobs can do with their data, you can do to.
The have services for getting playlists, finding info about different artists,
exploring the social tags applied by users. The documentation is not
necessarily up-to-date but Toby (the site operator) is always ready to help.
MusicStrands is a social
recommendation / discovery site.
They've just released their first public version of OpenStrands, their web services API. This API includes
catalog, recommendation playlist, tagging and community services (and it's free
to registered users).
great selection of MP3 music, this
website has extraordinarily good prices and excellent catalog.
Free indie music community and Video/MP3 sharing site.
Independent artists can upload and stream their MP3s and music videos; while music fans can discover, vote, comment and
share their favorites.
MusicBrainz is a community music metadatabase. They provide web
services for all of the information in the database including artists, albums
and tracks. MusicBrainz establishes a unique MusicBrainz ID for each track in its database
(using MusicDNS
fingerprinting technology).
"Simply a Huge
Everything of Music."
A free free-for-all RSS content content search engine and database that includes
recent, random news, reviews, postings, PR and podcasts from any and all areas
of music.
Anybody with a music-related
RSS is encouraged to submit it.
Which is run MusicIP (formerly Predixis) provides a music fingerprinting service that works with MusicBrainz
.
WebJay (now part of yahoo).
A
playlist sharing site. Webjay provides APIs for creating, modifying
and retrieving playlists.
A great music site, with a catalog of 106 020 albums
and lowest prices possible.
AOL music provides RSS feeds for their 'charts',
playlists and collections - including such things as the top songs, aritst,
albums and playlists.
Mp3Tunes is a music locker, a place for people to store
their music online so they can access it anywhere
(at home,
at work, on vacation), without needing to carry it. They also have an index of
about 50,000 songs that are freely available on the net (called sideload.com). The API allows for the syncing and
streaming of music (to and from the locker).
A great MP3 music site, with a good catalog and a decent
downloader. They have an extensive library and very inexpensive prices.
MP3Ninja is attempt of creating much
more user friendly digital music repository than ever. It provides information
about artists, lyrics and Hi-Fi streaming preview of all songs. Currently
library contains 63 000 albums and it is growing fast.
Connecting
friends with music (TM)
Personalized music video television for the internet. It allows
users to discover, enjoy and share music from all over the world.
Online music databases
Below is a table of
online music databases that are largely free of charge. Note that many of the
sites provide a specialized service or focus on a particular music genre. Some
of these operate as an online music store or purchase referral service in some capacity.
Among the sites that have information on the largest number of entities are
those sites that focus on discographies of composing and performing artists.
Database
|
Services
|
No.
of tracks
|
No. of releases
|
No. of artists
|
Notes
|
License
|
Full
free access
|
Music information and reviews
|
~20,000,000
|
~2,200,000
|
Song samples only
|
||||
Database and community
|
180,000
|
15,000
|
7,000
|
Song samples only
|
|||
Database and API of physical &
digital products, venues, photos, artists, participants, composers,
movements, labels, publishers and rights.
|
12,000,000
|
301,000
|
Multi-lingual, Global Coverage
|
||||
User-generated database of
physical/digital releases, artists, and labels. Marketplace.
|
21,500,000
|
2,500,000
|
1,900,000
|
||||
A heavy metal encyclopedia with
information, complete discography, links, images, and reviews.
|
~1,200,000
|
~74,000
|
~170,000
|
||||
Identification service for CDs
|
GPL
|
||||||
Identification service for CDs and
other media
|
~100,000,000
|
~8,000,000
|
1 billion "submissions"
|
||||
music download and sharing
|
|||||||
Music scores and parts, mostly
scanned from publications now in the public domain; some recordings
|
1,864 (88,066 scores)
|
5,147 composers, 64 performers
|
PD/CC-BY-NC-SA
|
||||
Huge live music archive and
host for hundreds of free musicnetlabels
|
~200,000
|
CC/PD
|
Yes
|
||||
free full-length music download
|
CC/Free Art License
|
||||||
advertising-supportedInternet
radioand social networking
|
Yes
|
||||||
Internet radio and music community
website.
|
12,000,000
|
Automatically creates online
library/collection of listened to music and generates recommendations
|
|||||
Lyrics wiki onWikia
|
|||||||
Largest Database of Arabic and
Middle Eastern music artists, tracks, and albums.
|
20,000
|
1,200
|
|||||
Album reviews
|
|||||||
Lyrics lookup
|
|||||||
Online music storage and community
service
|
8,000,000
|
730,000
|
590,000
|
||||
information about digital music
and artists (formerly freely-licensed music download)
|
Does not play its own music
|
||||||
Open contentmusic database.
|
10,000,000
|
948,000
|
608,000
|
GPL/LGPL/PD/CC-BY-NC-SA
|
|||
Biographies and discographies
|
|||||||
Search by melody (entering notes, Parsons
code, whistling, or tapping rhythm)
|
Yes, but via other sources
|
||||||
repository of free content sheet
music
|
|||||||
Artist bios and artist-uploaded
music streaming
|
|||||||
Artist, DJ, Producer bios and
artist-uploaded music streaming
|
|||||||
Music information, YouTube Videos
and Lyrics
|
200
|
||||||
Online publisher of classical
string music
|
|||||||
Music recommendation and Internet
radio service.
|
USA-only
|
||||||
Social Network and music stations
|
Yes
|
||||||
Nigerian Radio Station, Online
music community and Entertainment Portal
|
|||||||
Online music community featuring
Video Game music. Users can request and rate music. Music is selected by
election: During every song, users vote from a selection of three tracks to
choose the next song to play.
|
~11,000
|
~1,500
|
~1,800
|
||||
Catalog, rate, tag, and review
your music.
|
~1,900,000
|
580,000
|
|||||
Drum N Bassmusic database,
physical releases only.
|
|||||||
Service for free and legally music
sharing.
|
|||||||
Free music sharing using YouTube
API.
|
|||||||
repository of Creative Com
mons-licensed audio samples
|
CC Sampling Plus
|
||||||
User-generated database of
comparison between original songs and covers or songs that uses samples.
|
48,000
|
18,000
|
|||||
On-demand
streaming music services
The
following is a list of online music stores that
currently offer some free on-demand music
streaming of full-length content over the
Internet as a part of their service[15] without the listener necessarily purchasing a file for
download.[16] One might
compare this type of service to internet radio. Many of these sites have
advertising and offer non-free options in the style of an online music store. For a list of online music stores that
provide a means of purchasing and downloading music as files of some sort, see comparison of online music stores. Many of both types of
sites offer browsing by song title, artist, etc. that amounts to a form of
online music database.
Database
|
# of tracks.
|
Available
in
|
Pricing
|
PC
|
Android
|
iOS
|
BlackBerry
|
Windows Phone 7
|
Notes
|
7
million
|
Everywhere
|
Free/Subscription
|
Web
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
No
|
Soon
|
Commercial
free
|
|
13
million
|
FR/UK
|
Free/Subscription
|
Web
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
Also
available on Symbian.
|
|
USA
|
Free
|
Web
|
|||||||
22
million
|
Everywhere?
|
Free/Subscription
|
Web/Desktop
Application
|
Partial,
Rooted
|
Partial,
Jailbroken
|
Yes
|
No
|
||
12
million
|
USA/UK/Germany
(free) - Everywhere?
|
Free/Subscription
|
Web/Desktop
Application
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
Available
on Xbox 360
|
|
5
million
|
UK
|
Free
|
Web
|
||||||
11
million+
|
USA
|
Subscription
|
Web
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
No
|
No
|
Available
on Roku
|
|
700,000
|
USA
|
Free/Subscription
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
|||
6
million+
|
USA/UK/IR/FR/SP/IT/GE/JP
|
Subscription
|
Web
|
Yes
|
No
|
No
|
No
|
Available
on PS3/PSP/Bravia TVs/BIVL
|
|
9
million
|
USA
and Canada
|
Subscription
|
Web/Desktop
Application
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
No
|
Yes
|
||
9
million
|
USA
|
||||||||
13
million
|
Germany,
Austria, Switzerland, Belgium
|
Free/Subscription
|
Web/Desktop
Application
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
No
|
||
2.4
million
|
USA,
Canada
|
||||||||
15
million
|
Austria,
Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden,
Switzerland, United Kingdom, USA
|
Free/Subscription
|
Desktop
Application
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
Requires
aFacebookaccount. Available on Palm, Sonos, Symbian,Boxee[28],
Telia Digital-tv, webOS & Windows Phone 6.x.
|
|
8
million
|
Subscription
|
||||||||
6.8
million
|
UK,
Ireland & Belgium
|
Free/Subscription
|
Web
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
No
|
No
|
Now
a personal DJ service. Music on demand is still available to premium users.
|
|
10
million
|
Norway,
Sweden and Denmark
|
Subscription
|
Desktop
Application
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
No
|
No
|
||
10
million
|
USA
|
Subscription
|
Desktop
Application
|
No
|
No
|
No
|
Yes
|
Available
on
|
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