As a music student and enthusiast, I’m always looking for new music. Although CD sales are going down, digital music sales are actually going up. In this digital age there are countless ways to discover new tracks and artists from around the world. Here are some music communities you can join to increase your library.
last.fm is an internet radio site and an audio scrobbler site. When you download the last.fm application to your computer, it creates charts on everything you listen to in Winamp, iTunes or on your mobile music devices. last.fm uses the information from your charts to recommend new friends (called neighbors); you can listen to their charts and stumble on something you may like. The information also generates your own radio station that other people can listen to. There are tons of other features for the last.fm community, and it is something you totally need to be a part of if you are a music lover!
The Hype Machine is a music blog aggregator. This means that it follows what the most popular music blogs are talking about. You can also see the tracks that people are tweeting about. You can stream all the music on their own player or you can visit the blog post that each song was originally found on. There are also links to amazon and iTunes where you can purchase the track. Most of the time, the original blog post has a link to download the mp3. Although there are other types of music found on the Hype Machine, the majority of tracks are either remixes, mashups, dance tracks or indie music. This is because these genres tend to get in less trouble with the DCMA if an mp3 is posted on a blog. Another great feature is that anything you listen to on hypem.com can also be connected to your last.fm charts if you wish.
MOG music network is a subscription streaming site. Without subscribing, you can only listen to the first 30 seconds of the song. The other half of MOG is a music blog network. The difference between MOG and Hype Machine blog network is that blogs subscribe themselves to MOG rather than wait for the service to discover them.
Elbow.ws is another music blog community. It is a lot like Hype Machine except that they don’t have a player and it just directs you to the post where the track can be found. It has a slightly larger scope of genres than last.fm because you can apply to be an Elbo.ws blog and therefore more blogs are listed.
THE SIXTYONE is a place where listeners show their love or hate for new music. Everything you click on within the site starts a stream, and you can listen to it streaming. They are testing a new layout right now where you can scroll through and comment on all the current new tracks. The old layout can be found here.
I hope these resources help you expand your library and take you on a new kind of musical adventure. There are tons of other music communities out there, but these are a few that you MUST check out! Tune in for future updates.
i enjoyed the sixtyone. it’s a little different from what i usually see out there.
Last FM is dope too. I think soon soon people will just have their tablets or I pads and just stream music whenever, rather than actually downloading and owning mp3’s