I love music and the internet has certainly fostered that love. No longer do I have to depend just on the radio, friendly recommendations and music-store-serendipity to find music I might like. With the Internet I can now pull up an artist’s bio, scan through a complete discography, sample their music, listen to similar artists, and then buy the single song I was looking for.

So I thought I’d share some of the sites that I’ve found and use regularly (see below). You probably know some of them already, but if I missed one, leave it in the comments.

Places to find music and to tell people what you like and what you listen to:

  • Hype Machine - a music blog aggregator which has a handy player for playing mp3s added to the blogs. Good place to find new stuff.
  • last.fm - Find what people with similar tastes to yours are listening too. Tracks the music you play to do it. (my account)
  • iLike - Kinda like last.fm. I haven’t played with it, but it’s bigish on facebook.

Places to get information about music (other than wikipedia, google and myspace of course):

  • All Music - a super-good database of music information. There’s so much content in here.
  • Song Meanings - ever wondered what a musician was thinking when they wrote a song? Well you won’t find those answers here, just a whole lot of user speculation.
  • Covers Project - another social site attempting to capture who’s covering who. Handy.

Places to get music:

  • iTunes Store - the usual place to go. A slick experience. Only buy iTunes Plus though.
  • Amazon’s mp3 download service - very cool. Major labels are selling music without copy protection through Amazon. But only available in the USA presently.
  • eMusic - no copy protection, quality mp3 downloads, very cheap, not a lot of pop. They’ve stopped unregistered users from browsing too. Bit of a bummer.

Bonus sites:

  • SongTapper - find songs by tapping the spacebar
  • Midomi - find songs by humming or singing it
  • Songza - a more traditional search, but a very shmick interface
  • Flashback Radio - the best 80s internet radio station

Honorable mentions: Pandora (incredible music player, no longer available in Australia) and SeeqPod (handy search tool, ethically questionable)