Top 5 Free Music Destinations

Hey BeatCravers! Are you having trouble finding free legal music available on the Internet? To help you get the music you want, quickly and without having to jump through legal hoops, we’ve compiled our top five favorite online destinations for your free music needs.

Popular sites like Myspace, Last.fm and Pandora are lagging behind when it comes to innovation in navigating the thousands of bands available online. Our top five sites promise new ways of finding and sharing music, so check out the list below, and tell us what you think:

5. We Are Hunted

We Are Hunted tracks characteristics like “sentiment, expression, and advocacy” in comment sections, forums, blogs, P2P networks (and Twitter), and mashes all the data together to serve up the top 99 songs of the day. You can listen to all 99 songs for free, they are updated daily, and there are links to buy tracks on iTunes, if you’re so inclined. What makes the site so handy is that it’s a time saver. If you don’t have the patience to search the immeasurable vastness of the Internet for new music, We Are Hunted does the work for you, and keeps you updated on what’s new and popular online.

4. Spotify

In terms of catalog size, Spotify is the fastest growing music service on the web. It only launched last year, and already has 3,586,179 songs from 264,461 artists. If you compare that with Amazon’s 8 million songs, it doesn’t seem like Spotify will take long to catch up. With a simple download, you get a player that allows you to simply search their entire catalog and stream for free. With over 1 million users in the UK alone, and 40,000 people signing up every day, it looks like there is a new competitor for Last.fm and Myspace. The fact that it’s only available in Europe keeps Spotify from getting a higher ranking on our list, but it’s a good idea to keep tabs on the service’s availability if you can’t access it yet.

3. Just Hear It

Flash-based search engine Just Hear It turns up rare covers, remixes, and live performances from YouTube and the web, and you have the option to either view the video, or continue searching while you listen. You can create playlists and share songs on Facebook, Twitter and Digg. As of yet, accounts are available by invitation only, but when the service steps out of it’s “beta” version, you’ll be able to save playlists on your account. Just Hear It, by simply accessing YouTube’s enormous amount of remixes and user generated videos, can find any song or artist, and turns up some very surprising results.

2. Hypetape

Hypetape lets you quickly search the huge amount of music available on blogs throughout the web, and allows you to stream the tracks for free. Bloggers link to music all the time, and you can create a playlist that has its own URL address for easy sharing. Even though not every song works, you’re guaranteed to find rarities and less-known remixes of your favorite artists. Songs appear and disappear frequently from music blogs, so while Hypetape doesn’t promise longevity for each song, at least it always has something new.

1. Project Playlist

Project Playlist lets you create and share playlists. It’s simple, it’s free, and with the recent deal with EMI, Project Playlist has an ever growing selection of music for you to search for and listen to. The service boasts more than 42 million registered users, and you can quickly embed your playlist on other pages by copy-pasting the HTML code that the site provides. With its vast quantity of tracks and other users’ playlists, plus recent negotiations with the major labels, Project Playlist deserves it’s place as our number one destination for music.

We hope you enjoyed our top 5 music destinations. Make sure to come back to Beatcrave for coverage of the newest sites and services that provide free access to your favorite artists.