1. Imeem
Imeem is a social media network where users can create, recommend and discover music, film/video, art, and pop culture media and connect with other users who have similar tastes. It offers free, full-track streaming music from all four major record labels, Imeem has quietly been able to grow into one of the most trafficked social networking sites, with nearly 28 million (self-reported) visitors per month.
Recently imeem.com officially launched its very own iPhone app, offering the ability to stream, search, and purchase music over Wi-Fi or cellular connections for free and bears a resemblance to similar offerings from Pandora, Last.fm, and Slacker. You first need to upload your music to imeem.com from your desktop using its free Mac/PC-compatible client. Now before you go thinking that you can upload that 300GB iTunes library to Imeem and stream it anywhere in the world, there’s a catch. Imeem won’t charge you for the first 100 songs you upload to the site, but anything more than that will require a VIP service ($29.99 per year for up to 1,000 songs, or $99.99 per year for up to 20,000). It has the playback screen which is very similar to Slacker, with like/dislike, play, and skip controls. Option buttons pull up artist bio information and quick links to “Favorite” the artist or song, e-mail it to a friend, or purchase the song from iTunes.


2. Loudcrowd
Conduit Labs’ LoudCrowd, co-founded by former Harmonix employee Dan Ogles. LoudCrowd is AIMED for those who wish to engage themselves in music and explore their own ideas through the use of online music games. Loudcrowd is launching with 50 artists and over 250 songs featured on the platform, including music from the Indie rock bands Justice, Phoenix, Santigold, and Friendly Fires.

With music in the mix and a part of each game, challenges become an entertaining way to pimp out your character.Players are immediately placed in a crowd-like setting with music bumping in the background, and can opt to socialize with other players by creating custom dances and sending private whispers (messages), or play games to complete challenges. Once you have your moves down, you can pre-record a dance (friendly, flirty or flashy) and send it to someone else on the site.

3. iLike
iLike is an online service that allows users to download and share music. iLike catalogs what you listen to through iTunes (and now other players) with a downloadable application. What users listen to on itunes shows up in their iLike profile in categories defined by quantity and how recent a song has been played. In addition to displaying your own listening information, iLike tries to match you up with other iLike users who have similar tastes in music.
The newest service from iLike, now offers extensive integration with Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube, allowing artists to distribute content to each of their online presences from a single control panel. iLike is offering in a free, integrated and easy to use package which when combined with its existing iGoogle, Facebook, hi5, Bebo and Orkut apps, creates a must-use toolbox for any indie musician or label.

4. HypeMachine
HypeMachine is a music search engine that indexes audio files on blogs across the internet. Users can search for an artist or track, and play the song directly on the site. Every song is accompanied by writing from the blog post, along with links to the blog and links to iTunes and Amazon to buy the song.

Hype Machine have built a brand new chart which monitors their links that are tweeted, gives a number of points to that link based on how influential the person who tweeted it is, and then adds up all those points. This is going to lead to more exposure and ultimately a bigger fan base and more opportunity to sell something.

5. HypeTape
Hypetape brings together the simple playlist creating elegance of Muxtape  with the musical blogselence of Hypemachine. In case you’re not familiar, The Hype Machine indexes posts from top music blogs, allowing you to find and read about new music with ease. Although HypeTape doesn’t actually use Hype Machine search results, and isn’t affiliated with either Muxtape or Hype Machine, the name is a convenient shorthand to describe what it does.

You can search out individual artists or songs and create playlists saved to your username from them. The song selection is hit and miss on the track actually being available, but once you click a track and it doesn’t play, the service automatically updates and removes it from the search results, so you won’t, at least, run into the same aggravation twice.  Sign up, choose your favourite artists, and create and online playlist of their tracks. It’s simple, elegant and lovely.

6. Streampad
Streampad is a service that allows you to create music playlists and add them to an embeddable music widget that you can place on your blog or social networking profile page.
Once you signup for Streampad, you’ll be prompted to download a Java applet that will scan your iTunes library or hard drive for music.This desktop application is what will allow you to play your own music anywhere on the web: when you’re on your main computer, that application needs to be running. If it is, you can then connect over the web to that application, and play the music that its found on your machine.

7. Deezer
Deezer is the first full legally music search engine available and  is a very popular music website. At first it was called BlogMusik, but it’s creators(Daniel Marhely and Jonathan Benassaya) decided to call it deezer for a shorter name and cooler.

The quality of sound is great and the site is amazing.Some of the unique features it boasts are individual artist communities and forums, genre-specific radio stations, interactive music discovery games, and music news resources.
Users are able to create blind test and send them to friends and like many other social services website they can create a blog like MySpace or HI5 ones where they can share preferences and favorite music with friends and possible future contact or future friends. You can also become part of the community of Deezer.com by registering.

8. The Sixty One
The sixtyone is part music discovery site, part social music site, and part online game. The site lets artists create profiles and upload their music. Then users listen to the tracks and award ‘bumps’ to the songs they like. The ‘hottest’ tracks make the front page.
It features only about 50,000 tracks self-uploaded by indie artists and music labels, but visitors can listen to the full stream of each track and vote their favorites up the rankings by hitting the “heart” button.
The music player in The Sixty One works very smoothly. Hitting play starts the track in the top right corner of the screen and you can carry on browsing the site without interrupting playback. The site also makes it easy share music elsewhere on the Web by posting individual songs to Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, or the Global Grind. You can email a song link or embed the entire stream on another page.

9. Last.fm
Last.fm is a UK-based internet radio and music community website, founded in 2002. It is one of the world’s largest social music platforms with over 15 million active users based in more than 232 countries. Using a unique music recommendation system known as “Audioscrobbler”, Last.fm builds a detailed profile of each user’s musical taste.

Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 at 10:27 pm | by Kur-nia-one |