10 Music Sites Not Owned By Viacom (or big business for that matter)
July 22, 2008 | Derek Raisner | 30 CommentsJust before the Independence Day weekend, media giant Viacom won a legal victory over YouTube that set off fireworks across the Internet. The July 1st ruling essentially marked Viacom’s acquisition of 12 terabytes of YouTube user data with the intention to infringe on the public’s privacy in pursuit of copyright litigation. After a privacy fiasco like this, you can’t help but wonder about popular media websites and their link to big business: after all, Viacom owns Last.fm and MP3.com while live event giant Ticketmaster is a part-owner of iLike. Here’s a list of 10 music sites not owned by big business.
Pandora, the ever-venerable internet radio station just got better with their new iPhone app (Pandora without the computer!). Pandora uses the Music Genome Project to play stuff similar to what you like: type in a song/artist and it’ll spit out a radio station based around musical similarities. Unfortunately, Pandora is restricted to North America due to licensing limitations.
Named after a birthplace of American music culture, Highway 61, thesixtyone’s homepage is a crowd sourced radio that plays music that’s going to be huge in 6 months. It’s powered by a thousands of listeners and uses a social voting mechanic to make music discovery fun again. Think you know music? Sign up to play “fantasy music scout” where you can unlock Xbox-like achievements and earn experience points for picking the next great song. Oh yeah, they also have of one the best UI experiences of all the music sites we’ve been too.
The Hype Machine is a music blog aggregator and a great resource for those who enjoy reading blogs but don’t have the time to constantly check them. Songs on The Hype Machine are freely-available for streaming but usually expire after a period of time, although the site does provide Amazon/iTunes/emusic links to encourage fans to buy songs that they fall in love with.
imeem provides legal, ad-supported streaming in partnership with the Big 4 record companies. Amazingly enough, these guys survived a copyright lawsuit served by Warner Records to turn the tables and actually work with the labels to be the first website to legally stream their catalogs. Aside from the impressive catalog, Imeem’s also got a nice embeddable song player that lets you share songs anywhere that accepts HTML. Imeem’s particularly strong with urban/hiphop audiences.
The Live Music Archive is a community committed to providing the highest quality live concerts in a lossless, downloadable format. Music here comes from trade-friendly artists and is strictly noncommercial. This is a great resource if you’re an avid collector of live recordings in FLAC.
Simply put, PureVolume is MySpace without the seizure-inducing glitter effects. It extends the same type of functionality you’d expect on MySpace, including artist profiles, a flash-based music player, artist information, photos, and concerts. Founded way back in 2003 (Friendster was still relevant back then!), PureVolume is one of the oldest music-related social networks around.
KCRW is a popular radio station based out of Southern California and is a leading NPR affiliate. Most importantly, it’s home to the highly-esteemed show Morning Becomes Eclectic — an influential program hosted by Nic Harcourt that’s committed to a music experience that celebrates innovation, creativity and diversity by combining progressive pop, world beat, jazz, African, reggae, classical and new music.
Jamendo is a Creative Commons-based database of mostly European artists. The site claims to have nearly 11,000 published albums and does a great job helping musicians build flexible copyright terms around their content. Jamendo’s also great for those who swear by p2p protocols, providing options to download full-length albums as torrents.
RCRD LBL is a hybrid digital record label and music blog founded by Peter Rojas of Engadget, Joystiq, and Gizmodo fame. Music on the site is categorized via a tag cloud and you can also check out some editor-selected tracks by listening to the the RCRD LBL radio widget. In true music blog fashion, RCRD LBL provides freely-downloadable MP3s of featured songs and even licenses the tracks under Creative Commons – NonCommercial so you can remix the music into something new.
Fuzz is an all-in-one site that mashes a bunch of ideas together. Aside from standard social networking features, Fuzz allows fans to make mixtapes of tunes they’ve found on the site and also has an e-commerce tool where artists can sell their music. Fuzz also has a cool feature called blip.fm, a Twitter clone just for music.
Comments
30 Responses to “10 Music Sites Not Owned By Viacom (or big business for that matter)”
what am i still doing listening to my yahoo music trial? if i hear that ad telling me to upgrade again i might go bonkers.
thanks for the music e-lightenment!
pandora. jon b station = crack.
thesixtyone has a long way to go before it would be user friendly enough or stable enough to recommend it. High potential but squandered by a lack of instructions, an outdated FAQ, an interface that changes daily and has taken on the distinct air that wanting to know anything about a song has to be cleared with Homeland Security.
What started out as a “musical adventure concept” has turned into a “scavenger hunt” that requires too much effort to appeal to anyone outside a hardcore handful.
Creedo, who the fuck reads instructions anymore? Go on collect your social security check, homes.
Pandora and IMEEM have a lot of VC money behind them, which makes them a bit corporate. Plus, they suck. I never find what I want from them – which is something new and good. It’s always old crap, non-existent, or 30 second samples.
KCRW is a cool station. The Sixty One is an interesting idea. Archive.org is a rad database. But, ultimately, I’d rather find GOOD, NEW MUSIC on my own. I usually use betterpropaganda.com to find that sort of stuff. It’s been around for a while and has a lot of archived music. They’re free and legal mp3s as well, which I support.
They’ve got some good writers there as well. Check it out some time http://betterpropaganda.com.
If you like these sites, you may also like Laudr Underground Music.
http://www.laudr.com
It’s similar to T61, but has a nice user/content recommendation engine.
Check out sideload.com and mp3tunes.com.
Crispus, Pandora is about listening to a whole station, not clicking and expecting to hear what you want when you want it. ITS FREE. Ive found tons of new music on pandora, just by typing in one gorillaz song ive been introduced to hundreds of other artists. If all youre hearing are 30 second clips its becuase youre too obsessed and one of the willing instant gratification slaves that the itunes generation has produced. Youre not going to hear your fave matchbox 20 or nickelback song when you want it with Pandora. theyre going to try to help you expand your awful taste in music.
Definitely check out http://www.muxtape.com , it’s a great adventure seek quest for styley new tunes.
Pandora is NOT available to those who live outside the United States
pandora is directly linked with amazon and/or other retailers. Not only that, there is a hidden agenda with the service that promotes specific genres and artists even if you never want to hear them.
try musicovery.com
Give CLLCT a shot (http://cllct.com). It’s as far away from big business as it’s possible to be. As of right now, there are…516 releases and 331 artists.
i must say i love pandora, mostly due to the fact you get to see so many new groups/artist/songs. But it is a give and take, if you don’t rate your songs, your just going to get, the site will not learn your tastes. As far as corporate situation goes, i don’t know of their standpoint, but legal+free+quality=me listening to it.
Yeah! CLLCT for sure.
Personally, I like the simplicity at http://www.musicbawx.com.
We’ve just recently launched indizoo.com. A ways to go yet recruiting artists and resources, but building steadily.
We are totally out of pocket and volunteer. Our programmer Alex has worked miracles. The concept builds on localized versions of the site in different countries and regions. We have partners in Japan (Takanao and Seiko Sato), Russia (Jenna), the Caribbean (Javin James), Bulgaria (Alexandra Terziiska), and Nashville (which will be live in a couple weeks and managed by award winning songwriter Jimi Anderson and marketing whiz Alee Gury).
The site is still building features with Downloads and Ringtones available soon. We have launched a custom ee-shirt designer on the site so artists, and fans and resources as well, can create merch.
The site is completely free….would welcome any feedback, comments and suggestions…we don’t have the corporate brains to rely on…only you and our heart for the music community.
Deezer (www.deezer.com) is French but available everywhere. You can search and listen music, videoclips and talk with other users, you can upload your own MP3’s (no limit), make your own playlists, play Blind test, listen to radio, …. legally.
You must try it.
pandora is not available in canada. you say north america, but it’s probably restricted to the usa.
Good site for inde artist
http://www.musichostnetwork.com
Should have put in Jango. It is like pandora but better and can be used by anyone in the world not just americans.
@ Rmg12, good point. Thanks for the tip. http://www.jango.com is pretty good too.
I can’t believe http://www.magnatune.com isn’t on this list. Their very existence is counter to corporate music, plus they have great selections!
I really dig imeem.com because of the incredible mix of independent artists. My band streams from imeem and we’ve really gotten a lot of exposure from it.
It isn’t a complete list without KEXP.ORG, based out of Seattle Washington. Its member supported, streaming online radio. You can correct me if I am wrong, but I don’t know of any Viacom attachment. Its licensed to the finest public institution in the country though, the University of Washington.
rcrdlbl and imeem! woo hoo!! LOVE those two sites – can be on them for hours. i’m a huge supporter of rcrdlbl.com – introduced me to MANY many new artists that i wouldn’t have heard about elsewhere.
These are great sites for finding new music similar to what you’re interested in. For just a simple MP3 search engine and direct download i like http://www.plorf.com
As Stephen Rees and others have pointed out, Pandora is not available outside of the United States.
Contrary to what the majority of you Americans seem to believe, Canada actually is a country geographically larger than you, and also located above you on this comfy little continent that we share.
It just sticks out like a sore thumb the way you dropped that line in there, it screams ignorant American, and ‘I don’t check my facts’.
Then again, this ^is^ the Internet, if it wasn’t true it wouldn’t be allowed to be posted right? So I can’t help but quetion myself, could I be wrong, could I actually be American and not know it?
You totally forgot http://wallbrawl.com which was the first to bring a game style voting system a months before sixtyone
Another music site boasting a one-man staff just launched last month. They’re called Got Scene? (www.gotscene.com) and they list venues, events, music, charts, houses for touring bands to crash at, and all kinds of stuff. Just launched, so resources run a bit thin, but things are picking up slowly.