3 Free Tools for Great Music on the Web

I love music.  I have spent a good por­tion of my life writ­ing, singing, play­ing, and lis­tent­ing to it.  Regard­less of the genre, great music is some­thing I value highly.  So, dis­cov­er­ing new music I enjoy and redis­cov­er­ing long for­got­ten old favorites from ear­lier in my life makes me happy.

When I was a young col­lege stu­dent, many moons ago, I would spend hours flip­ping through the racks at CD Con­nec­tion, search­ing for that lit­tle known Pearl Jam boot­leg, or the side project that Mark Arm did, or the CD with Phish jam­ming with San­tana, etc…  Most of my friends did the same thing, and as a result life was filled with great new tunes.  Time was more abun­dant, and music was a cen­tral part of my daily life.  How­ever, with work, fam­ily, and the other respon­si­bil­i­ties that come with adult­hood, it is not as easy as it once was to find great tunes. The inter­net makes all of that eas­ier.  Here are 3 sites that can help you find great music in a flash.

Pan­dora — I have writ­ten about this site before, but it is worth men­tion­ing again.  Pan­dora is amaz­ing.  To begin using it, you name your “radio sta­tion” (you can have sev­eral if you like) and you enter the name of a band or a song you like.  From there Pan­dora will play that song or artist, and oth­ers with sim­i­lar musi­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics.  You can rate them based on your pref­er­ences, and as you do Pan­dora learns about you.  Using some­thing called the music genome project, Pan­dora deter­mines what char­ac­ter­is­tics you like about music.  It is not just who you like, but what you like and why.  This allows Pan­dora to reg­u­larly sur­prise you with new music you enjoy, as well as giv­ing it an eery abil­ity to pull clas­sics from the archives that at one time would have been in your favorites.  You can share your sta­tion with oth­ers, read infor­ma­tion about the bands and songs, and link directly to itunes and ama­zon to make pur­chases.  I have been using Pan­dora for sev­eral years now, and I am still amazed by its abil­ity to sur­prise me with great new discoveries.

Songza — Songza is a search engine for music.  Go there, type in a band name or a song title, and it returns numer­ous results of music tracks.  This is great for the times when you hear that song, but can’t remem­ber the name exactly.  Or, when your nephew or niece, being young and still cool, is kind enough to drop the names of some cool new band they just saw in con­cert.  Songza is a great tool for research­ing poten­tial new favorites.  It is also great for when you have a par­tic­u­lar song stuck in your head, or the guy in the cube next to you says “no I’ve never heard that song,” and you are des­per­ate to hear it.  Songza puts spe­cific titles right there at your fingertips.

Musi­cov­ery — This is a recent find for me, as my brother in law Chad for­warded a link to me.  Musi­cov­ery gives you the abil­ity to choose the gen­res of music you feel like hear­ing, the time frame or era in which it was recorded, the mood you are in (pos­i­tive v dark) and (ener­getic v calm), and the rel­a­tive pop­u­lar­ity of the music it chooses.  This allows you to build a very cus­tomized radio sta­tion on the fly, based on how you feel at that spe­cific time.  It has a great cat­a­log of tracks, and was amaz­ingly in-tune with what I “felt like lis­ten­ing to.”  It has a very cool inter­face, and deliv­ers a very engag­ing user expe­ri­ence.  It is dif­fer­ent from Pan­dora, in that it is more mal­leable, but it offers less sur­prise as a trade­off.  I see it as a great com­pli­ment to Pan­dora, depend­ing on how engaged you want to be in the selec­tion process.  Musi­cov­ery also links directly into Ama­zon, mak­ing it easy to buy tracks that you want to own.

Give these sites a shot, and let me know what you think.  Know of other great sites?  Share your knowl­edge with us by leav­ing a comment.