Places to Listen to Free Music On-Line

The Hype Machine is the single simplest and most useful tool for finding music reviews and previews on the web today. (Click the logo to the left for a visit.) Here's what this little gem does: it takes a list of hundreds of blogs that host mp3 files and gives you a way to listen to all of those mp3s in one place. It gives you an excerpt of the corresponding blog post and a link to the actual site.

Should a track prove to be reasonably popular, the Hype Machine folks archive the file so that you can listen to it months after it was originally blogged. As a member of the site, you can follow individual blogs, put artists on your watchlist, and mark the songs you love with a big red heart.

But that's frosting on the cake that is an ever-changing list of songs to which you can listen in full, for free. You can scan through page after page of other people's favorite songs or their reviews of new releases and preview every one of these tracks. If you love music as much as I do, you're already salivating. While enjoying these tracks, you can also marvel at the names some bands will choose without regard for the poor bloggers who want to promote them. How can I use names with curse words in them as headlines on my blog?! Obviously, lots of people do, but folks like that get a pass from me. In general, I suspect that their music will be just as unsuitable for children or a work environment.

The Hype Machine does one more amazingly-helpful thing. When you search for everything that's been blogged about a particular song or artist, it'll offer suggestions for what other listeners searched after that same term. Most often, that results in a song or band that is either similar to the one you to the mp3 you were playing or fits the musical taste of someone who enjoys the same sorts of genres and styles that you do.

Alas! the fate of LastFM and Pandora! What used to be two of the best on-line radio stations, chock full of amazing technology to help you expand your taste in music by recommending new artists and songs, have been reduced by corporate music industry greed to mere shadows of their former selves. LastFM now charges for anyone outside of the United States or the United Kingdom, which means that those who have "scrobbled" their listening history for five years can no longer access their own personal Top 100 charts. (Imagine my heavy sigh, here.)

Should you be in the US, however, Pandora and LastFM are both still available for free and well worth your exploration. Pandora does far better with more obscure artists and genres, in part because they simply have a more diverse catalog and in part because it links songs and singers by elements in the music rather than vaguely-defined genres or the eclectic tastes of fellow listeners.

I use both of these services to find music similar to the songs I already know and love so that I can offer more variety and interest both in my own constant listening and to the readers of my own recommendations. I find the enormous world of music to be limited only by the imagination I put into finding new bands and singers and Pandora and LastFM offer me avenues to the corners of that world badly neglected by more mainstream venues.

I've been immersed in music since I was a child. My siblings and I wore out many a record and constantly had the radio playing when the record player was not. I took piano lessons and was a band nerd for several years as well. Apparently I am susceptible to rhythm and melody, and will sing and dance at the drop of a hat (neither well).

I can remember moments when I found a song that opened a whole new genre to me. A long drive with a women whose company I did not particularly enjoy led me to discover big band music and gave us the common ground for pleasant conversation. An awkward social event at which music I'd never heard got everyone else on the dance floor introduced me to New Wave music in the 80s. Digging through my parents' long-negelected records before a garage sale brought Harry Belafonte and Simon and Garfunkel to my attention.

I started my blog because I've always wanted a venue for sharing my love of music. I (not-so-)secretly harbor a desire to be a radio DJ, not because I want to perform morning show banter but because I'd love to be able to share with people the music that has filled my life with joy and discovery. Failing the chance to do that, I post old and new favorites in a place that, in theory, everyone in the world can enjoy them as well: my very own Not-Pop Jukebox.

When I pick a song for my music blog or when I want to write about something from a particular artist, I head over to Grooveshark and search for the band or the track in which I am interested. Ninety-five percent of the time I find precisely what I wanted, and often I"ll find something I didn't even know existed. I can create playlists or simply choose individual mp3 and then customize a music player to embed on the Not-Pop Jukebox. The absolute best thing about Grooveshark? You can place widgets for full songs directly on your page from their site, without going through a third party!

The folks over at Grooveshark claim that you can "[p]lay any song in the world, for free!" That may be a bit of a stretch, but you can certainly find an impressive number of songs, especially if your taste runs to the less-popular and more-obscure. In addition, you can upload your own library and listen to it anywhere you have access to the Internet. You can also mark favorites and Tweet the songs that you love if you're on Twitter.

For those times when Grooveshark fails me, however, I turn to imeem. While the library at imeem may be larger, and the site more professional in every sense, you can only listen to the full length of most songs if you are logged in to the site. That makes the embeddable (and non-customizable) player far less worthwhile, as it often serves up only a thirty-second clip. Nonetheless, if you're looking for a place to stream free music to your heart's desire, sign up here and wallow in it.

Here, too, you can create playlists, but you can also make friends, post updates, and see upcoming local shows on your dashboard. When you search for a song you'll get recommendations of related songs, a preview of the band's bio, and a link to a page for the album on which the song appeared where you can often listen to the rest of the songs. How's that for a useful preview?

While I love all of the above free music sources, nothing can beat real, live radio with songs introduced by real, live people. I don't listen to podcasts and most of these sources don't offer them anyway. I do, however, love to hear people interact with music directly, whether through band interviews or simply a rousing introduction for a song. The two sources that I'm sharing with you here give very different insights into music, from the wide and worldly to the wacky.

National Public Radio, to whom I donate a portion of my royalties from every lens I create, has the broadest music information I have found anywhere on-line and the most-developed feedback mechanisms I've seen. Not only can you hear artists perform live during interviews, you can surf channels and listen to specials on nearly every genre. I listen to David Dye and the World Cafe every weekday and find many of my new favorites there. Should I desire more information or miss the show, I'll simply head to the NPR web site and read and listen to in-depth profiles that you just don't get anywhere else.

Sometimes, however, I tire of analysis and suffer from information overload. When I just want to hear little-known and rarely-aired music with a casual (and unpaid) DJ staff, I turn my dial (or click over) to KNDS, the only local station that plays it. The station is rough around the edges, to be sure, but they stream live on-line and keep their playlist up-to-date so that, when I hear an unintroduced song and feel that burning need to know the title and performer, I simply visit the site and my wish is granted.

When I discover a new song through either of these sources, I head over to Grooveshark or imeem, find the song, and get a player for my blog. Then I try to explain what it was about the song that drove me to hunt it down and claim it for my own. I'll often listen to anything else those sites have to offer by the same artist and, if I am impressed enough, I'll run out and buy the albums that have so impressed me. That inevitably leads to finding and posting more songs from the artists, a happy cycle that gives me more to share.

While The Hype Machine offers a snapshot of the songs that music fans love, there's no substitute for reading the reviews and recommendations that individual bloggers can offer. Here are a few of my favorite blogs for finding great music to add to my collection:

• Popdose, whose name belies their wide-ranging tastes
• Culture Bully
• The Adios Lounge for stunningly-deep reviews and histories on bands you thought you knew or of which you've never heard
• Mashuptown for, well, mash-ups, most of which are free to download from the page of the original...er, masher
• Battle of the Midwestern Housewives, for punk and ska punk
• Cover Freak, who is even more obsessed with cover songs than I am and is, like me, a big fan of Keb' Mo'

I can happily waste an hour at any of these sites, reading and listening to fantastic songs. While they may not all be widely-read, all of them demonstrate their love of music with every post and remind me of why I started The NPJ in the first place. Some days, that nudge is enough to provide inspiration for a really stellar post, the sort that any blog needs to succeed.