Home » Music

The Absolute Best Places to Discover New Music on the Web (Beyond iTunes)

0 Comments
- You must choose!
- I'm listening...

2 Like

Like 2

Pin It

Ranked #9,587 in Music, #260,509 overall

Does your iPod contain the same stale music as that box of old cassettes sitting in the back of your closet? Check out this list of sites that will direct you to the latest and greatest music... tailored to your tastes.

I haven't forgotten you.

This site is incredibly out of date as of today (10/21/07) but I've got a lot of great stuff to add (and some dead sites to subtract) over the next couple of days. Keep watching!

* marks updated links or info.
*** marks brand new sites!

A Sides

Start here!

This handful of sites will provide you with more musical inspiration than you'll know what to do with.

Last.fm: Last.fm is my favorite music resource. Install their small piece of software and it will hook in to your favorite mp3 player and keep track of everything you listen to. Not only will the site give you personal Top Artist & Track charts, it will suggest new artists you might like and connect you to musical "neighbors" with similar tastes.

*This site just keeps getting better. Now with customized music video picks, concert listings, playlists, and free mp3 downloads!
LAUNCHcast: Yahoo's online radio site is an oldie but a goodie. Rate music and build a customized station based on your tastes. Listen to dozens of preprogrammed stations, hundreds of artist-based stations, or the stations of your friends. If you're lucky enough to have a paid subscription (my SBC Yahoo DSL account includes one!) you can listen to extra stations, all commercial free.

*Yahoo's in the middle of redesigning their entire music site. I haven't found anything particularly special about the new beta site preview, but Launchcast radio is still going strong. Tons of well crafted stations on a huge selection of themes, from "Uber Indie" to "India!"
Finetune: The newbie of the group, Finetune is in beta but already showing a lot of promise. The only site that allows you to build custom playlists of specific songs you like, and share them with the world. Don't know what you like? Pick an artist and hear a station of similar, or click the "I'm Lazy" button to have the site fill up your playlist. The selection is large but limited, and a bit more skewed to the mainstream than the others.

*This isn't a site I've used a whole lot but they have definitely been hard at work with the updates. The music selection has expanded massively (2 million tracks and growing, according to the site.), the site is super slick, and they seem to be working themselves into every corner of the web (facebook, widgets, embeddable playlists, even the Wii!
Pandora Internet Radio: Input a song or an artist and Pandora finds others it thinks you'll like. Rate music to add or remove it from your station. Create multiple stations and share with your friends! Pandora's system is quirky but definitely unique.

*Pandora got a new look but smartly didn't mess with the mechanics. I love the concept of selecting songs based on musical similarities, but in practice I think it suffers a bit from too much math and not enough human input.
The Hype Machine: Hype Machine is a great resource for finding the latest and greatest. The site culls mp3 links from all the best music blogs and presents them in searchable playlists. Find out what bloggers are talking about and listening to right now, listen to HM's playlists, or go to the blogs themselves and grab the MP3s.

*Hype Machine is also in the middle of a huge site overhaul. They've made it prettier, included more blog content, and let you stream songs directly from the page. But they've also lost some great functionality like the playlists that you could stream through your mp3 player or a popup flash player. They've promised a return of the web player in some form though, so stay tuned.

Need More?

Can't get enough? Here's more great music sites.

allmusic: The most comprehensive resource I know of for music information. Their weekly new releases email newsletter is great.
elbo.ws > Music Blog Aggregator: Another music blog aggregator, similar to Hype Machine. Sometimes includes tracks that Hype Machine doesn't. Also has video listings.
Radio.Blog.Club: Add music to your blog or just search for a track to listen to.
Musicovery : interactive webRadio: Musicovery may not include the largest selection of music, but it sure is fun! Click on the matrix to choose songs from a range of "dark" to "positive" and "calm to energetic." Or narrow the selection by tempo and genre. Musicovery selects a song for you and displays it along with its neighbors on a music map. Click and explore!
videos.antville.org: The best new (and old) music videos, dissected in true music nerd fashion.
Yes.com: Need to know what that song was that you heard on the radio? (You remember... that thing in your car that's not attached to the internet.) Look it up here.
Radio-Locator: Find a radio station in your area.
Singingfish: Search the web for audio or video.