You can download songs of pretty much any genre to your music arsenal with a simple click. Music is virtually always at our fingertips.
There are several music websites that allow you to upload, share and listen to music. Here are a few of the hottest that you may not have discovered yet.
The Kollection.com
The Kollection is a favorite because of its simple and intuitive design, as well as its categorization of music. At the top of the page are tabs for Dubstep, Electro and Indie.
The main Kollection page features rap, hip-hop, remixes, originals, covers, mash-ups, videos and interviews with artists and bands.
A major appeal to The Kollection is its ease of use. Once you find a category of music you want to listen to, just scroll down to a song that looks good and you can play, rate and download the track, or even add it to a customized playlist.
Each song has a short blurb describing the artist and style of music. The tracks are played through SoundCloud widgets.
The artists agree to share their music with lovely listeners like ourselves, so most of the songs on the Kollection are free to download.
8Tracks.com
8tracks is like Pandora, but uses playlists instead of playing songs in a random order like a radio station. Anyone can create an account for free and upload their own playlists or listen to others’ playlists.
People can tag their playlists with descriptive keywords like “chill,” “dubstep,” or “happy.”
What is great about this site is that you can get really specific with what you want to hear by selecting multiple tags to come up with awesome combinations to suit your mood that day.
8tracks also allows you to follow people that create playlists you like, so you can always have quick access to their music.
If you don’t like the song that starts playing, go to the next track, but you can only skip twice per hour.
The song skip limit and the fact that you can’t download music directly from the site are a drag, but if you really want a song, there are other ways to get it (legal and otherwise).
Regardless, 8Tracks is a great site to discover new music and listen to a playlist without having to actually create one yourself.
Spotify
Spotify is a free music streaming service that started in Sweden in 2008, and traveled across the pond to the U.S. this July.
It has the layout and organization of iTunes with the freedom of Grooveshark–an awesome combo that allows you to search for and play songs for free.
So is Spotify legal? Yep! Spotify has a free, unlimited and a premium version. The free version is supported with occasional advertisements, but by upgrading to unlimited or premium, you can stream music without any commercials messing up your groove. Going premium has the added bonus of allowing you to copy your Spotify library to your phone.
One nice thing about Spotify is that you can import your entire iTunes library into Spotify, so there’s no need to switch back and forth between the two libraries.
Perhaps one of the coolest features of Spotify is the ability to connect with your Facebook account and share playlists with friends who can then “like” the songs, artists or albums to which you’ve listened.
If your account is connected with Facebook, the songs you listen to will show up as an activity on Facebook that all of your friends can see. But don’t worry, you can disable this feature to listen to your guilty pleasure songs.
Pitchfork.com
For the indie/alternative crowd (or the inner hipsters within us all), Pitchfork is a great resource. The layout is similar to The Kollection, and SoundCloud widgets play the music here as well.
Pitchfork has an array of features like news, album reviews, music videos, critic’s choices for the best new music, band/artist tour dates and information on upcoming music festivals.
Under the “best new music” tab, you can choose between best tracks, albums, re-issues; or if you just wantsome guaranteed good tunes, you can check out the 8.0+ reviews tab which only displays cream of the crop albums.
Free downloads are usually provided in the best new tracks tab so you can grab a tune and enjoy it endlessly.
The album reviews tab is extremely helpful when you are curious about how critics rated a certain album, old or new. Albums are rated on a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being eargasmic. There’s also a descriptive editorial about the dynamics of the album and information about the artist.
Sources:
DJ (photo): The Kollection,
http://thekollection.s3.amazonaws.com/electro/files/2011/10/kue.jpg
Girl with headphones (photo): HD wallpapers desktop,
http://hdwallpapersdesktop.com
Purple Boombox (photo): For Designer, http://www.fordesigner.com/pic/zip/200981823525664077801.jpg
Records (photo): Hipser Music Scene, http://hipster-musicscene.net/images/ev_10.jpg
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-spotifys-business-works-2011-10
http://www.phillyburbs.com/blogs/reality
Links:
1. http://thekollection.com/
2. http://soundcloud.com/
3. http://8tracks.com
4. http://www.pandora.com/
5. http://www.spotify.com/us/
6. http://www.apple.com/itunes/?cid=oas-us-domains-itunes.co
7. http://grooveshark.com/
8. http://facebook.com/
9. http://pitchfork.com/
10. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=eargasmic