Ways to music

Starting today, I intend to write about some of things I use to make my computer exprience better. If you are using something I didn't write about, please share with the rest of the group!

Spotify

I don't believe Spotify has passed anyone unnoticed. Spotify is a music player like iTunes or Windows Media Player, with the difference that all music is stored remotly on Spotify's servers. This means that you can access all your music from any computer with the Spotify client software installed (free to download from their website). Every user has an account where all their playlists are stored, therefor accessible from any computer. By streaming all music from their servers, you don't need to have a local music library flooding your hard drive, and you can listen to your favourites at work.

Spotify is a great music application and a great concept, but it is currently held back by the music industry and some artists. Recently Spotify had to remove many artists and songs from the already quite limited music library. I really hope they're coming back.

If you can obtain an invitation, Spotify is free with ads. Otherwise there's a montly fee of about $10, or a day pass for a tenth of that cost. Spotify is available on both PC and Mac.

Another cool thing about Spotify is that you can share playlists. Collaborative playlists are cool too. You can share a playlist with your friends that everyone can update. A few sites have popped up because of the ability to share playlists. On these sites you can listen to other users compilations. Some of these sites are Spotify Friends, Spotifylists.com, Listiply, Spotylist and Your Spotify.

If you have Spotify, you can listen to my mixed list.

hypem.com

I can get pretty tired of the music I am listning to sometimes, and need something fresh. Ordinary radio channels doesn't usally play new music, so where to tune? Hypem.com collects the most popular music on the Internet by checking music blogs and such. You can see what's the latest, most popular or what other users or countries are listening to. Hypem.com provides a great variaty of music, and because of that not all music might suite you.

You can of course listen to all this music on the site. Or, if you prefer (like I do), there also is an Internet radio channel to listen to online, or with Windows Media Player, iTunes, Winamp etc.

Music heard on TV

Want to know what that song in that TV ad is called? If you happen to live in Sweden there is a good service for that - Reklammusik.se. If you don't live in Sweden I bet there are plenty similar services available to you. Ads in USA and UK

If you want to know a song from a movie or a TV-series episode, I'd use Tune Find. They keep track of many popular shows and movies. There are other sites also, like heard on tv.

Pandora

These days the Internet is becoming more and more regionally dependent. Since I don't live in the US, I can't access Pandora anymore. Sucks to be me. 

Update: There seem to be ways to get around the moats Pandora has dug around their national borders. The site globalpandora.com is dedicated to this. It also provides many alternatives, though I think they merely are free online music libraries. Thanks Emil for enlighting us!

Update: Anna found another Spotify playlist service; myspotify.com. Looks great!