Safer than piracy and cheaper than iTunes
Whatever your genre of choice, it’s probably available via Internet radio’s Pandora or last.fm (Cyklista Dalibor/Flickr.com/CC Attribution 2.0 Generic license)
Music is great and all, but it sure does get expensive buying all of your favorite songs from iTunes. Surely there must be a better way. Indeed there is, and don’t call me Shirley.
Personally I rarely find myself downloading music anymore because of how easy the Internet makes for streaming music. Two services headline on this subject, Pandora radio and last.fm.
last.fm lets you effortlessly keep a record of what you listen to from any player. Based on your taste, last.fm recommends you more music and concerts
“We had to invent a word for this, it’s called scrobbling” is last.fm’s tagline. The website is great for the way it expands your music library, and it’s completely free. Sign ups are the most painless experience I’ve ever run into as they only ask for a user name and password. The service allows for limitless additions to your music profile and is amazing for when you don’t know exactly what you want to listen to.
If launched with iTunes the program will scrobble your every track and make a playlist for every artist, genre and just overall your music. Last.fm is available for a number of hardware other than your computer. Xbox 360, iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, as well as a number of speaker systems listed on their website.
“Since we started back in 2000, we’ve carefully listened to the songs of tens of thousands of different artists … and analyzed the musical qualities of each song one attribute at a time,” wrote Time Westergren, founder”
Pandora was the best Internet radio out there when it was first launched back in 2000, but with the amount of ads, limits on time and playlists the service has declined for the free crowd. Pandora is also available for a number of mobile devices and some hardware speakers. A full list is available on their website.
Pandora isn’t all that bad. It’s great when all you have in an Internet browser for music. All you need is an e-mail address and a password and you get 100 radio stations that will follow you wherever you log in.
If you haven’t already heard of these two radio services please do yourself, your family, your children, your husband and or your wife a favor and check them out. Whether you’re student or faculty tune in, tune out, drop in drop out, switch on switch off and explode with Internet radio.