My friend wanted to hear “Up on Cripple Creek” by The Band this morning, so he created a station on Pandora and they started to play a similar song by The Band and then Pandora played songs related to it based on their genome project. But I don’t think that Pandora can play song for it’s customers on demand because of a licensing issue. So where do we go online if we want to hear a song immediately in its entirety?

Obviously YouTube is a good place to start but sometimes you have to sift through the covers and live versions before you can find the studio version that you want to hear. I have had good luck with Last.Fm. Without getting to all the reasons why, they now have a very deep catalog of songs for people to listen to on demand. My experience is they don’t have every song and sometimes they only have 30 second samples, but quite often they have what I am looking for. I have been using them to listen to bands or songs that I have never heard before and sometimes to listen to an old classic that I don’t have or am to lazy to digg up.

I have also been recently checking out mp3.rhapsody.com since they now are allowing people to listen to 25 songs a month for free. I only have been listening to new songs on Rhapsody since they have this 25 song limit. Since I use more than one browser it seems that I can listen to more than 25 songs if I access their site with a different browser.

So if you want to check out a new band or listen to a song you haven’t heard in a while, check out the three sites that I have mentioned above. If you use a different website or service to listen to music on demand, please leave a comment and I will check it out.

~Riley

For those of you that have never used Pandora, go to Pandora.com and pick your favorite song or artist and Pandora will play that artist or a song very similar to that artist. I won’t go into here how they do that since they explain that on their website. As Pandora plays songs, you must rate each song with a thumbs up or thumbs down. The more you rate songs the better Pandora gets with picking songs that are closer to your taste. I have discovered numerous bands that I would have never discovered anywhere else and turned my friends on to some great music. My friends are always asking where I discover all this great music and I say Pandora.

Just recently Pandora added classical music which is rare for the majority of music websites that I haved used. I love classical music so there is not much to discover but it is a great way to relax to commercial free music.

If you know of another website that can compete with the music discovery of Pandora or offers up a great selection of classical music let me know.

~Riley

This will be a quick post about a site that has quickly become one of my favorite places to listen to music online. Nutsie allows a user to upload their entire iTunes library to its website site by exporting your iTunes library in a xml file format that can uploaded to Nutsie’s website. This saves the time of having to upload each song individually.

Nutsie then creates a database of your music that you can listen to from any computer connected to the internet. I find this is a great way to listen to my music at work. I cannot fit all of my music on my iPod and it saves the wear and tear that would take place if I listened to my iPod everyday anyway.

It is not perfect since it sometimes plays live versions of songs or songs that are closely related to the songs in your list, but it does a very good job and plays songs that I would probably never hear on other sites. You can tell it you hate a song it plays and it seems like it won’t play it again.

I haven’t played around with every feature that it offers but I will report back as I use it more, but for now I thought I would recommend it to all of you and let me know if you have used it and like it.

Till next time,

~Riley

I just recently discovered a new website that lets a user create an online mixtape of 12 of your favorite songs, Muxtape.com. While it is cool to create a muxtape and share it with your friends, I think the coolest benefit that I get from it is by clicking on other people’s muxtapes and discovering a new band or song that I never would have been exposed to before. I wish I could search for a specific band to find others who have the same interests as me but I think that might get Muxtape in trouble with the content owners and the RIAA. You cannot download any songs, but I don’t care because it is a great way to discover music and then I can buy it from Amazon, iTunes or eMusic. You can save your favorite muxtapes so that you can go back to them and listen multiple times. I did find a great companion site that lets me find other users who are similiar to a user’s muxtape that I like and it is called Muxfind. Other than Pandora, this is now my favorite way to discover new music. Let me know what you think of it and ways that you are using it to enhance your digital lifestyle and while your at it listen to one of my favorite muxtapes: alexisgreat.muxtape.com/

~Riley