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Music Guide For Better Music Online

By Sylvia Adolvana


It seems that the free music landscape is always changing. For a time, everyone was using Napster for their music downloads, but lawsuits and tales of "cyber spies" linked to the site destroyed its legacy. Then there were a group who followed Soul Seek, but the torrent system wasn’t as user-friendly to Napster converts.

Another group headed to Kazaa or Limewire, other new download sites. However, many of the files were corrupted with viruses or pornography, which made the whole process intolerable. Today there are many ways to listen to music for free online, without enduring all of the headaches. Use this free music guide to find your way around.

Myspace (www.myspace.com) quickly became one of the best sources of free music. In fact, many bands shut down their websites completely and relied solely on this social networking site to list their gigs and post new music. You can use their music guide to look for local music, bands that sound like other bands you like or music from a certain genre.

Streaming Music On MySpace

On many pages, you can also buy music for 99 cents a song. The benefit of Myspace is the ability to listen to a number of songs by a particular artist, while also gaining access to music news, blogs, videos, photos, tour dates, merchandise and more.

The downside is that you can’t usually save these songs on your computer; it’s mostly a streaming site, but sometimes you can save select songs or make them play on your Myspace page with a single click.

Listen To Music Of A Particular Genre

Another great resource in our music guide is the ever-popular Last FM (www.last.fm), which now has more than 3 million unique visitors each day. The complex search engine analyzes your likes and dislikes to refer you to other songs and new music artists you may like.

You can tag music, recommend it to a friend or blog about it. The more people listen to and like a song, the more it gets passed around. Users can peruse the most popular artists in their genre of choice and listen to a radio station of that artist, along with videos. Last FM Radio also allows users to listen to a particular genre.

Options To Buy Music From Amazon And iTunes

There’s a button that allows users to buy music from Amazon and iTunes too. The benefit of going with Last FM is that you can gain quick access to band videos, photos, bios and tour dates as you listen. The downside is that the suggestions are a little more commercial and a little less intuitive than Pandora (www.pandora.com).

You’ll find there are many sites that advertise "free music downloads," although we haven’t included them here in our music guide. If you’ve ever visited www.mp3raid.com or www.ez-tracks.com, you’ll realize that you have to jump through hoops to get the top music that is free.

There are tons of irritating pop-ups (whether you have a pop-up blocker or not) and even more noisy banners hooting and hollering at you. With a less annoying website like www.bearshare.com, you have to download interfaces onto your computer, which you may not feel comfortable doing. Deep down you know it; the best way to get the songs you want is simply to buy them.

About the Author:
Sylvia Adolvana has written articles on digital photography and software including Bridal Portraits, Wedding Announcements, Red Eye in Portraits, Photo Balloons, Photo Albums, Photo Enhancement, Small Digital Cameras, Create DVDs, Family Web Site, Graphic Design.
Keep a lookout as more articles are added from this popular author on this website in the near future.

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