I use Last.fm simply because it's completely free over here in the US, doesn't play ads after the first initial ad and doesn't have time restrictions like Pandora's 72 or something hour limit. I've been messing around with Spotify but I'm simply too lazy to make play lists for the wide range of music I enjoy. Much easier to just think "I feel like Heavy Metal today" and play a Heavy Metal premade station.
I have been rebuilding my deck all summer. Fire up the xbox, blast it through the stereo speakers and I get hours of music chosen for me with no interruptions. While last.fm seems to go deeper than Pandora, it still repeats music too much for my liking. Putting on an artist station does get good variety, but if you listen to the same station the next day, you just about get the same playlist.
Voted other: Soundcloud, but I'm probably something of an outlier. Other than that its mostly podcasts/radio/purchased music, with a tiny bit of spotify.
I use Grooveshark when I know what I want to listen to, otherwise there is a great service called The Hype Machine at hypem.com which is an excellent source of new and upcoming electronic/rap/dance/indie music
I'm using Google Music Beta, primarily because it's free (for now), but also because they sent me a Cr48 and my first question when I got a Google Support Ninja on the phone (had to deal with a 3G problem) was about the best music app. They didn't have one at the time (he suggested lots of Google Ninjas use Grooveshark), but now they do, so I'm beta testing that as well.
My biggest problems with it:
- Frequently loses the 'play' button - the bottom control bar disappears after a while of leaving the tab open.
- No play counts in several of the views (album, for instance).
- No scrobbling - but there's a great Chrome extension called Better Music Beta which does it for you.
- No nested playlists or smart playlists.
- Uploading needs a lot of work - after uploading my entire library, I realized that a lot of the genre metadata was wrong, so I changed it in iTunes. The music uploader then started re-uploading a few thousand songs...
Things I like:
- It has all of my music!
- It's currently free...
- It sync'd my iTunes playlists (the non-smart ones anyway).
- It's good quality playback, and I've never had a display or playback problem that a page refresh didn't fix.
For streaming music, YouTube playlists and http://www.di.fm/ are my favorites for convenience. It's nice to have the tracks sequenced by actual DJs in mixes if I want to hear a lot of new stuff. Di.fm is the only streaming service I have actually payed for before, they have a good iPhone app as well.
I also use Last.fm, but only for passive scrobbling and not listening.
Youtube should definitely be on this list, it has an insane amount of material compared to every other catalog, there are even plenty of out of print Vinyl rips being uploaded.
I buy a lot of (physical medium) music, so I don't need to pay for a music service and I have a collection of music on my hard drive that I want to listen to. Because of this, I use Google Music a lot, especially considering they have a good mobile app for my phone.
Grooveshark has become a distant second since I got my Google Music invite, and I used Last.fm before I found out about Grooveshark.
Spotify!
Although I'm always disappointed by their mobile apps, it's still the easiest and quickest way to create and listen to playlists. Their library is large enough for me, with only a few (5-6) artists I'm missing. But now that you can add local files, that's not a problem anymore.
In roughly this order, and none of them all that frequently.
Youtube
iheartradio
Soundcloud
Used to be iTunes but I don't use that anymore, and deeply regret every file imported into that piece of junk software. I may start using amazon mp3. The truth is despite being a musician (or maybe because of it) I am not an avaricious consumer of music. Recently I downloaded a bunch of music from the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum website and that's lasted me months.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] threadI have been rebuilding my deck all summer. Fire up the xbox, blast it through the stereo speakers and I get hours of music chosen for me with no interruptions. While last.fm seems to go deeper than Pandora, it still repeats music too much for my liking. Putting on an artist station does get good variety, but if you listen to the same station the next day, you just about get the same playlist.
4 years ago I decided not to support the music industry anymore.
CTRL+C > CTRL+V :-)
My biggest problems with it:
- Frequently loses the 'play' button - the bottom control bar disappears after a while of leaving the tab open.
- No play counts in several of the views (album, for instance).
- No scrobbling - but there's a great Chrome extension called Better Music Beta which does it for you.
- No nested playlists or smart playlists.
- Uploading needs a lot of work - after uploading my entire library, I realized that a lot of the genre metadata was wrong, so I changed it in iTunes. The music uploader then started re-uploading a few thousand songs...
Things I like:
- It has all of my music!
- It's currently free...
- It sync'd my iTunes playlists (the non-smart ones anyway).
- It's good quality playback, and I've never had a display or playback problem that a page refresh didn't fix.
I also use Last.fm, but only for passive scrobbling and not listening.
Youtube should definitely be on this list, it has an insane amount of material compared to every other catalog, there are even plenty of out of print Vinyl rips being uploaded.
Grooveshark has become a distant second since I got my Google Music invite, and I used Last.fm before I found out about Grooveshark.
Youtube
iheartradio
Soundcloud
Used to be iTunes but I don't use that anymore, and deeply regret every file imported into that piece of junk software. I may start using amazon mp3. The truth is despite being a musician (or maybe because of it) I am not an avaricious consumer of music. Recently I downloaded a bunch of music from the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum website and that's lasted me months.