Free legal streaming music is a great thing to enjoy when you are searching for a particular song, working, or just plain relaxing. Listed below are some of the more interesting live streaming music sites that are definitely worth checking out. Some of the sites below operate as live streaming radio stations, and some allow you to program your own virtual station, or even to search for a specific song or artist. Check out all of them, since they are all free!
Jango is one of the easiest to navigate streaming sites. You can select an artist that you like, or you can even select a genre. The site will create a custom station for you on the fly and serve up music in your genre. It also suggests artists that you may be interested in based off of your currently selected genre. Great site to find some new songs in a favorite style.
Songerize is one of the cleanest and easiest of the music streaming sites to use. Upon loading the website you are presented with two search boxes, Song Name and Artist - thats it. You type in something to search on (either one) and hit play, and away you go. Its great when you want a no-nonsense web site to play a specific set of songs that you already know in advance. The only real annoyance to this is that you have to keep entering a new song title after every song has finished playing. Can't be beat when you just need to listen some of your favorite songs.
Last FM is very artist focused. You are best served on this website if you already know the name of a band or artist that you are interested in. There is a very deep catalog of music, and the music plays right though the web site, so you don't need any special software. Not everything is available. For example if you select the Beatles you will only get a preview because the full Beatles content is not licensed by the site. They also sell MP3 downloads on this site. One really nice thing about this website is that you don't need to have an account to listen to the live streaming music.
Pandora is perhaps one of the best known free live streaming music sites on the internet. Pandora grew out of the Music Genome Project. The idea with this project is that the system will monitor your likes and then create a custom station which will match those likes. In my testing it seems to work reasonable well. A nice thing about this website is that you can type in a music type as well as an artist and it will attempt to build a station to your likes. For example if you like Piano music, you can type in Piano and it will create a station of piano music. In some competing sites you would have to select a piano music composer in order to get the same result.
Songza's great claim to fame is the depth of its catalog. This site's variety of music is amazing. Songza has licensing agreements with most of the big major music companies so you can usually find something to listen to. The interface of the site is also very google like. You can be listening to a song well within three clicks of the mouse. The site also has a featured songs section, along with top played or requested songs.
Slacker has a very unique folder structure to its online music player. It is a great site if you are looking for a streaming station in a particular genre. It seems to be alot weaker when you are looking for a specific artist. While the interface is polished, it does have some annoying limitations to the free streaming service, including limiting the number of tracks you can skip.
Musicovery uses a feelings based system to help you select artists to listen to. You can pick your mood - weather you want energetic or positive, or dark and calm, and any graduation in-between and it will select artists and songs based off of those preferences. The mesh that it displays on the screen makes it easy to discovery new artists that you may like. In short this system on this web site is fun to explore and play around with.
