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Five Best Music Streaming Services [Hive Five]

Posted on February 28, 2010
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The internet has revolutionized nearly every form of media, and music is no exception. This week we look at the five most popular music streaming services to see how people are getting their music fix.

Photo by CarbonNYC.

Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite music streaming services, and now we’re back with the top five contenders. Read on to learn about the services and then cast your vote in our poll at the end.

Grooveshark (Web-based, Free)


When you’re ready to listen to some tunes online, Grooveshark allows you to jump right in. Unlike many services that require a subscription to use, Grooveshark lets you search for music and build a playlist as soon as the site loads. If you want to save the playlist, however, and access other session enhancing features like flagging songs to enable the music suggestion service, you’ll need an account. Aside from manually building a playlist, you can also listen to Grooveshark Radio, their suggestion engine. One of Grooveshark’s most unique features is that if you can’t find a song or artist you love, you can upload the music from your own collection to build the Grooveshark database.

Spotify (Windows/Mac/Mobile/Web-based; Basic: Free/Premium: €9.99 month)


First the bad news about Spotify: as of this writing, 02/28/2010, Spotify isn’t available in the U.S. due to various legal issues and licensing requirements. The good news is that Spotify is an incredible music service, and we're always hearing whispers that it'll soon be available stateside. You can collaborate on and easily share playlists using the service—as easily as you share a link to a YouTube video for comparison's sake. A premium account adds more features, like commercial-free listening or the ability to listen to your playlists on your mobile phone. Premium service also enables offline mode for local storage of music, higher quality streaming, and travel access—so should you visit a country like the U.S., where Spotify isn't available yet, you can still enjoy it.

Pandora (Web-based; Basic: Free/Premium: $36 per year)


Pandora is the easy-to-use front end for the massive database of attributes generated by the Music Genome Project. The Music Genome Project analyzes songs with up to 400 different attributes so when you tell Pandora "Play me something like the song Punkrocker by The Teddy Bears featuring Iggy Pop" it doesn't just return a song that people who liked "Punkrocker" also liked—it returns a song that is also "genetically" related to your suggestion. Pandora may not have the most bells and whistles of the music sharing services rounded up today, but the power of the Music Genome Project and ease with which you can create and rate personalized streaming radio stations has won Pandora many fans. Upgrading from free to premium service allows you to stream more than 40 hours a month, gives you access to a dedicated desktop client, and increases the quality of your audio stream.

Last.fm (Web-based/iPhone, Basic: Free/Premium: $3 per month)


Last.fm is another service that not only streams music but generates suggestions for new music based on what you like. In addition to building playlists and enjoying tunes on the web, you can "scrobble" your own music collection to Last.fm—which basically means you let Last.fm track the songs you're listening to and add them to your Last.fm profile, allowing you to both listen to them and use them to increase the scope of Last.fm's suggestion engine for better personalized picks. In addition to listening to streaming radio and building personalized stations, Last.fm also allows direct music download—when authorized by the copyright holder—so you can expand your personal collection as you listen.

Lala (Web-based, Free with per-song fees)


Lala's claim to fame is the ease with which you can listen to both your own music over the web and purchase new music inexpensively. Lala has a database of 8 million songs that you can listen to once for free, purchase for online play for $0.10, or buy as a DRM-free MP3 for $0.79. If you have a song in your personal collection—on your computer at home—you can add it to the Lala database to allow unlimited play without paying a fee. Lala doesn't sport a hefty music recommendation engine like some of the other contenders in the Hive Five—although we didn't find the one they have lacking—but instead focuses more strongly on connections between people to drive music suggestion. As a result Lala supports easy rating and playlist sharing with friends to encourage organic music discovery.

Now that you’ve had a chance to look over the top contenders for champion of the golden earphones, it’s time to cast your vote in the poll below to decide the winner:

Which Music Streaming Service Is Best?polls

Have a favorite that didn’t get a nod? Have a creative way to use one of the Hive Five nominees above? Let’s hear about it in the comments.






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Lala Lets You Sample Whole Music Tracks Before Buying [Streaming Music]

Posted on November 18, 2009
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Online music site lala allows you to listen to song after song and album after album for free. The catch? You can only listen to them once, unless you pick up a web album or MP3 version for cheap.

We’ve been playing around with lala for several days now and haven’t had too many qualms with the service. Yes, we have our own extensive music collection, access to sites like Pandora or MixTape.me (developed by Adam) but lala has a few notable services of its own to recommend it.

You can choose to listen to songs by typing in an artist (LadyGaGa), theme (Christmas), or genre (Jazz), and lala will pull up a listing of tunes matching your search results. Without registering, you can listen to any song by clicking on the play button, but if you’ve taken the 30 seconds to register, you can hit play on a whole album to listen to while you go about your internet musings.

At first we were annoyed with the idea of not being able to listen to things more than once, but the more we started to play, the more we really got into the swing of things. There’s been so many albums we’ve passed on downloading, not having heard the whole album, and it’s been kind of refreshing to listen to new things outside of our own record collection.

It’s an easy interface to look at and operate, and might allow you to check out a new release album before deciding to download or buy it for real. Lala isn’t a brand new service by any means (it was originally a CD-trading service, incidentally), so if you’ve been using it recently, let’s hear how you like it in the comments.






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Mugasha Mixes Party Sets So You Don’t Have To [Music]

Posted on September 3, 2009
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Need some ambient music for your next party? Stream some long-play music sets from Mugasha and focus on enjoying the party instead of working on the perfect play list.

Mugasha catalogs long-play electronica sets by prominent DJs. Unlike some music sharing services where you have to pick and choose through songs and create your own master playlists, Mugasha already has the music sorted into sets for you.

You can search for songs and artists to play individual songs, but the songs themselves are part of a greater set. You can subscribe to artists to keep abreast of when they release new sets, share your favorite tracks and sets via social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and purchase music when available from iTunes and Amazon.com.

Browsing and listening requires no login; if you want to save favorites and participate in the site, you’ll need to create an account or login using Facebook Connect.






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Flavortunes Lets Your Guests Build Your Party Playlist [Music]

Posted on August 16, 2009
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Nobody wants to throw a party with stale music. Flavortunes invites your guests and has them RSVP with playlist suggestions at the same time.

After signing up for an account at Flavortunes, you can send invitations with pictures and themes to email contacts. Flavortunes makes it easy to manage your RSVP list, with prominent icons indicating who can come, who can’t make it, and who hasn’t responded yet.

Not only does Flavortunes turn the music-selection process at your next gathering into a more open affair, it has great potential for creating some interesting playlists. You can attach additional information with your invite including the theme of the party and let your guests choose music to fit the theme. Election night party? Spin up some “I Swing the Election” by Jack Teagarden. Last bash of the summer? “It’s Summer Time” by the Flaming Lips might make an appearance.

Have a favorite service or tool for building a party playlist? Share your tips and tricks in the comments.





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TubeMaster++ Update Makes Grabbing Videos and Music Easier [Downloads]

Posted on June 30, 2009
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Windows only: Last year we shared TubeMaster Plus with you, an extremely handy program for downloading videos and music from streaming sites. TubeMaster++ has been released and comes with a slew of new features.

TubeMaster++ makes grabbing streaming videos and music incredibly simple. As long as TubeMaster++ is running, it will grab nearly every kind of media you watch over your internet connection thanks to its ability to scan the incoming data and not rely on the browser itself. Whether you’re watching a video in Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Opera, as soon as you start watching it, TubeMaster++ will begin capturing it.

You can save files, play them back right in TubeMaster++ and convert them. What formats can you convert into? A better question would be what formats can’t you convert into. You can convert audio formats into WAV, MP3, OGG, and AC3, among others. Video can be converted into dozens of formats and presets for mobile devices including the Creative Zen, iPod, Blackberry, PSP and PS3, various mobile phone sizes, and more universal formats like AVI and MPEG4.

TubeMaster++ does lose one feature from its predecessor: because of dependencies it has on installed software it is no longer portable. The trade off will be more than worth it for most people however as the new version is more stable, offers more features, has a built-in video and music search engine, and has dropped the upgrade requirement to download from adult video-sharing sites. TubeMaster++ is freeware, Windows only, and requires Java Runtime Environment and WinPcap (both of which are included in the installation if you don’t have them.)





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Opera Unite Puts a Media Server in Your Browser [Downloads]

Posted on June 16, 2009
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Windows/Mac/Linux: A test version of Opera’s formidable alternative browser introduces Unite, a plug-in that lets users share music, pictures, files, notes, and chat rooms straight from their desktop. Check out its services and features in a quick screenshot tour.

Before jumping into the big pictures, note that Opera 10 with Unite is a “Labs” release, meaning some features may not work as intended and might run a bit buggy. I created Unite services in an Opera window and accessed them with a Firefox browser, and all but the straight-up web serving, oddly enough, worked just fine.

Once you’ve signed in, or signed up, with an Opera account, you can hand out your sharing URL (in the form of computername.username.operaunite.com and, when you start up your Opera Unite services, your friends will see the same landing page as you. Streaming music and full-res pictures from your system can obviously be a bandwidth and system resource drag, but if you’re using Opera Unite mostly while you’re away from your system, that’s probably not an issue.

Opera Unite is a free download for Windows, Mac, and Linux systems; using and serving up files and media requires a free Opera account sign-up. Click the screenshots below for a gallery-style tour of Unite’s features, and be sure to hit the “800×600″ links for full-size shots.


The controls for Opera Unite mostly run out of a pop-in sidebar, allowing you to start, stop, and configure services you want running. Oddly enough, to set a password for each service, you have to visit it from the browser instead of set it in your configuration panel. New services can be installed with a few clicks from Opera’s site, but it appears this Unite test version comes loaded with everything that’s out there, for the moment.

The Fridge is a pretty neat, simple, and ingenious little service. Anyone who knows your sharing name can stop by and write a little note to tack to your fridge, though you can tweak the accessibility from the configuration options.

The straight-up web server. Doesn’t support PHP, mySQL, or any of the other modern web services (though those may arrive in the future), but could be helpful for selective web access to your-eyes-only documents, or hosting docs from crashed/overwhelmed servers.

Photo sharing is straight-up and simple. The server points to whatever folder they want shared, and the user sees thumbnails and bigger pictures when clicked, and can download the full-res version from there.

Music streaming is also fairly straightforward, but offers preview streams along with full downloads. If you’ve got a whole lot of music you want to offload to friends, you’d be better off running the more direct File Sharing service (not pictured, but pretty much how you’d imagine it).

The chat service works well and is really snappy in relay time, at least in our own browser-to-browser tests. Then again, there are a whole bunch of web-based services that let you create instant chat rooms (TinyChat and Chat.io come to mind) without having to make your browser the center of repetitive pings.





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PulpTunes Offers Dead Simple iTunes Streaming [Downloads]

Posted on June 6, 2009
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Windows/Mac/Linux: Streaming your iTunes collection doesn’t sound like an easy task, but PulpTunes makes putting your music library on the web a two-click affair.

When we first showed you how to stream your iTunes collection back in 2005, it was a 10 step process involving an SSH tunnel. Things have gotten rather streamlined since then. During our testing of PulpTunes, total setup time, including downloading the actual software, was under one minute and completely automated. The only thing you need to do for PulpTunes besides running the installation file is opening the default port in your firewall to enable remote access.

Once you’ve opened the port, a visit to youripaddress:15000/ will load a screen like the one shown above, populated by your music collection. PulpTunes runs wide open by default, so we’d suggest going into the User Management menu and enabling a username and password. You can access your iTunes playlists on the left hand side, search through your music collection, or drill down through your collection by genre, artist, and album. The buffer adjustment feature is handy, allowing you to tweak the amount of playtime that will be buffered based on your network speed. Not a fan of iTunes? Make sure to check out Sockso, a similar streaming server that works with any music collection. PulpTunes is open source and available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.





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Radio Sure Streams and Records 12,000 Radio Stations [Downloads]

Posted on April 5, 2009
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Windows only: Pared-down portable application Radio Sure streams and records more than 12,000 channels of music and other radio feeds. If you can’t find something to listen to, you’re probably not looking hard enough.

The interface of Radio Sure is straightforward, if a bit cluttered. It starts with a master list of radio stations and a search box to narrow down the stations by genre, country, language, and other name. At the bottom of the window are some basic controls for playing and recording the streams, as well as information about the song if it’s embedded in the source. If you’re looking for even more online music, check out our feature on downloading and listening to free music on the web. If you have your own favorite means of streaming radio wherever you are, share in the comments below.





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Roll Your Own Streaming Media Server with Subsonic [Downloads]

Posted on April 5, 2009
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Windows/Mac/Linux: Is having your entire media collection on tap, ready to stream wherever you may be, too much to ask? Not if you’re using Subsonic.

Subsonic can be installed on everything from a Windows-based computer to a home server running FreeNAS. Once installed, you can tune into your media collection from anywhere you access the web or use your mobile phone. Subsonic is a complete web-based front end for your collection. You can search tracks, listen to saved podcasts, assign ratings, add comments, and create playlists. Subsonic supports on-the-fly resampling to keep the quality high, even when you're using a lower bandwidth connection—you can turn the feature on permanently if you've got a bandwidth cap you're trying to stay under. If you're a fan of Last.fm, Subsonic has support for the service and will scrobble and update your now-playing status. There's a demo account available if you’d like to take the interface for a spin before installing it. Subsonic is free, open-source, and available for Windows, Mac, *nix systems.





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