Face-melting concert photo

Five FREE Music Sites You’re Not Using (Yet)

Posted Sun, September 21, 2008 at 12:06 am by Todd Levy

If you're anything like me, you like free music. And if you like free music, you'll want to visit to these lesser-known music sites offering unique ways for you to find free music you can listen to right now.

The five free music sites featured are:

Know another great free music site? Post a comment below.


Jogli »

Screen capture of Jogli

Pros

  • Huge catalog
  • Video for most songs
  • Music continues as you browse

Cons

  • YouTube audio quality hit and miss
  • Song accuracy not 100%

Jogli is a music search engine claiming a catalog of 12+ million albums and 500+ million songs. It's an amazing service, built primarly on top of YouTube content. Search for a band and they'll show you a link for that band's details as well as albums, video clips, and user-created playlists.

Jogli's got a really well-conceived browsing experience, with drilldown by band, album, collection and so on. Click and album name, and you'll get a review, track list, and a big “Play Album” button. Click that, and the magic begins.

Jogli recreates albums from YouTube clips and other free services. If you don't like the version of the song they've selected, click the “Get alternatives for this song” link to see what else they have.

Jog on over to Jogli »

Favtape »

Screen capture of Favtape

Pros

  • Create and share multiple mixtapes
  • Import Pandora & Last.fm bookmarks

Cons

  • No browse by album
  • No embedded video

Favtape is just one of many sites built on top of the Seeqpod database. But hot on the heels of Muxtape getting shuttered by the RIAA, they've has emerged as a front-runner in the mixtape creating and sharing genre.

You can get started creating your first of many mixtapes (er, Favtapes) with a simple search engine and novel browing options like top songs by year, iTunes top 100 songs, and greatest artists. And a list of popular mixtapes as voted on by users offers a modest sense of community.

Perhaps best of all, you can easily create mixtapes based on your bookmarked songs on Last.fm and Pandora. Sweetness.

NOTE: Here's some great free music on Last.fm.

Once you create a mix, Favtape makes it easy to link to, rearrange or rename. Plus, you can shuffle the songs before you listen so each mix gets a bit more replay value.

It's one of my favs, Favtape »

Soundflavor »

Screen capture of Soundflavor

Pros

  • Audio and video
  • Sophisticated song search
  • Convert audio playlists into video

Cons

  • No browse by album
  • Must join to create playlist

Soundflavor describe themselves as “a great place for making music video playlists that you can watch and share.” But to me, it's a great music search engine with a ton of ways to “dial in your sound” including genre and subgenre, decade, instrument, mood, lyrical subject, tempo, and more.

NOTE: I tried seaching the Partying mood expecting to hear some killer Andrew WK tunes but no such luck.

Artist pages are a mashup of information from Soundflavor's huge song database and other content from around the web like artist news and pictures. They've also got about 30,000 free songs from independent artists.

Songs and playlists open in a little pop-up player with YouTube videos, and each player is also an embeddable widget that can be shared on the usual social networking and bookmarking sites. Nice touch.

On top of that, Soundflavor's unique playlist converter lets you transform an iTunes playlist into a video playlist. Another nice touch.

Take a taste of Soundflavor »

Grooveshark Lite »

Screen capture of Grooveshark Lite

Pros

  • 100% legal
  • High quality full songs
  • DRM-free downloads for $0.99

Cons

  • Audio only
  • Sometimes slow to load

Grooveshark is an “online music sharing community” where users can get paid half of Grooveshark's revenue when people download a song they've uploaded.

Grooveshark's sister site Grooveshark Lite is a slick music search engine with an intuitive interface that lets you quickly drill-down by artist, album, song, genre, and playlist. Each song is available in full, and the tendancy is towards good sound quality since every track is for sale.

Create an account on Grooveshark to save playlists, collect your favorites, and download songs DRM-free for $0.99.

And don't miss their extensive list of what's popular. It'll blow your mind, but perhaps in a bad way.

Surf your way to Grooveshark Lite »

Streamzy »

Screen capture of Streamzy

Pros

  • Unique, efficient interface
  • Audio and video
  • Drag-and-drop playlists

Cons

  • Slow on some browsers
  • No artist or album view

Streamzy, also built on top of Seeqpod, sets themselves apart with a streamlined Flex-based interface offering efficient music search and playlist creation, and by letting you effortlessly combine audio and video.

Search for a song or artist and the results list fills up promptly and accurately. You can re-sort by title or artist using a familar tabular data control, and easily share the song on social networks and bookmarking sites. Click a song and the audio or video appears immediately in a panel right below the search results list.

Another nice feature is their drag-and-drop playlist creator. Anyone can use it, but as expected you'll need to register for an account to save your playlists.

Your earz will enjoy Streamzy »

Know another great free music site? Drop some knowledge below.

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2 Comments so far   

We7 is another service where you can legally listen to music for free, you can create and share your own playlists with music from three of the four major labels and hundreds of indies and there is also the facility to buy and own what you really love.

Steve Purdham
CEO - We7
http://www.we7.com

Steve -

Thanks for posting about your site

I remember seeing We7 mentioned on TechCrunch in an article about The Filter. Will definitely try out your site and consider it for a forthcoming post.

Speaking of the ad-supported model, I’m really curious to see what happens with MySpace music. Sure you are too!

Take care and again, thanks for the comment.

TL

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