Niches for listening music legally on the internet

So, let's start with the definite place to visit, if you're searching for music: Skreemr.com. The site itself claims, that it does not break any copiryghts, as it just links to music on other sites. On my opinion, this site is just great. It allows listening to the chosen song through the web browser, so there's no need of winamp or some other music player to listen to songs. It searches for album covers on the net (so you can watch the cover while listening if you want to); it provides tons of information about the songs; the search algorithm brings out a huge list of songs, especially for popular artists. If the results brought are too many, the searching may be customized - by writing for instance "The Artist I Want To Listen To" in quotes will bring out results with the exact match of the text in quotes; if you want a word necessarily to be present in the search list, you have to write a + sign in front of it; the - sign serves for the contrary action. There is a plugin for firefox, by which Skreemr may be added to the search engines of the browser, afterwards accessible via Ctrl + k.

There are search engines, such as Exploseek.com, for instance, that would search for songs on the internet, but the aim of this post is not to point to such engines and sites, the latter one added just for info.

The next place that is mandatory to be visited, if you want to listen to nice music on the internet, is, of course, Last.fm. For the nonregistered users it gives the opportunity to type the name of their favourite artist, and then creates an internet radio station with artists, similar to the preferred one. If you don't like the current song played, you can just skip to the next song. The music may be listened directly from the brower, without the need of any media players. The more interesting part comes when someone registers; the registration is very easy and fast, and reveals many more opportunities for the users. Among them is the opportunity to pay a relatively reasonable (to me) fee, for which one can listen to the favourite songs wherever he is (one creates his own playlist on the internet with the songs one loves). There are also user groups, and a bunch of radio stations, created by users (for instance, radio station for smooth jazz and so on). Last.fm is very well integrated in the best music players - winamp, amarok, rhythmbox, xmplay, foobar2000 and many others, through plugins for these players; the plugins are usually to be found at the websites of the players. Unfortunately, recently last.fm wass bought by a huge company, which may be for good (or maybe not) for the future of this great resource on the net. Still, if one has a favourite artist and is looking for diversity and for new music, similar to that artist, last.fm suggests such music, and I like the way it does it. An interesting feature for registered users is the opportunity to embed a radio station with the beloved artist in weblogs. But let's move further to the next resource on the net.

Magnatune.com has a very interesting music selection. Although the artists there are not so well known, some of them are VERY good. I personally like the quitar things of Jeff Wahl. The site lets users listen to mucis on the net (throught the browser, no additional media players needed). After that, if the user likes the music, it can be purchased in exchange of a sum, which the user decides upon (I think 5 dollars for an album was a possible cost there). There are plugins for some media players in Linux (for instance, Rhythmbox, Amarok, GMPC/MPD) supporting streaming of music through Magnatune. I can say nothing but a huge "Thank you!" to the developers of these players.

Of course, there are also countless blogs pointing to mp3's and music resources on the internet; there are appllications like Songbird that are specialised in searching for music on the internet. Mentioned in this post are just a few places that offer some diversity in finding music of the favourite style one likes to listen to.