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Essential Online Music Tools: Digital Music Services

In our last post on digital music, we explored using Twitter lists and blogs to cut through the vast amount of music available to music lovers. With over 75,000 albums to choose from in 2010 alone, it can be quite a daunting task to separate the wheat from the chaff. In this article, we’ll discuss some of the services you can use to find music that’s new to you.

Spotify and Rdio

These two services are perfect for finding music that you haven’t heard yet.

Rdio has an editorial interface with a very thorough list of new releases for the week. The interface also recommends influencer accounts whose musical taste is close to your own. Plus, it shows who your friends are listening too. This is really great to find out what is trending in your friends listening lists. So, if you trust their musical palette you’ll find some really good stuff.

Sometimes, it’s just about being nosy. Rdio allows you to know what other people are listening to right now, and lets you mark albums to listen to later. So, if you’re listening to one album you can search around the site and bookmark new stuff to listen to later.

Spotify is great for listening to older music, and random music the interface recommends. Spotify actually functions more like iTunes. It’s quite simple to find an artist and add whole albums into a playlist. For instance, we listened to the Blind Melon catalog and realized that Soup was really an outstanding album. So, it’s really great for finding back-catalog items from musicians.

Spotify is also really good to add bands that we haven’t heard either. For example, whenever we find ourselves reading about a band and have never heard their stuff we just add it to a Spotify playlist. This is a perfect feature for
finding music we haven’t explored. Spotify also allows you to see your friends playlists too.

Spotify is great for singling out whole genres of music to check out also.

Last.fm

This is the absolute must social network for music lovers. The main reason for this is because your song count doesn’t ever have to reset. You will always have an idea of how many times you’ve played a song or artist. If you look close you may find that artists you thought were your favorites don’t even get any airplay!

However, if you use Last.fm you can check out your profile and tell what artists you have listened to the most. Another cool thing about Last.fm is it allows Spotify and Rdio interaction in addition to iTunes so your listening gets counted there also.

Lastly, Last.fm recommends other artists to listen to that aren’t in the library and offers free downloads from artists you listen to. You can also check out what your friends listen to also.

Amazon.com $5 Albums

After all that listening you are bound to find something you really enjoy, right? So, it’s time to buy! Always remember that free downloading and streaming doesn’t earn your favorite artists hardly any money at all. Most of the time it’s nothing. So, it’s a good idea to give them a few bucks for their hard work.

Make sure you check out the Amazon $5 digital album sales each month. One of the best things about these $5 albums are that they are a loss leader to get buyers to the Amazon music store. Participating artists still earn the full amount they would earn from a regular priced album.

As a music lover you almost certainly own a mp3 player and/or a PDA to play your tunes on the go. If you need to replace a mp3 battery or PDA battery, Laptops For Less can help!