The government may have made it difficult to acquire free music these days, but thanks to bands that recognize the marketing potential provided by the internet, there are still a few sites where you can legally get music without paying a dime. Be it in the form of streaming songs or promotional downloads, these websites have found the middle ground between Napster and the record store.

Check them out for your free music fix…

Continue Reading

Pandora Radio is one of my favorite websites of all time; there’s no better way to explore music and find interesting new songs. For those of our readers who are somehow unfamiliar with the site, Pandora builds customizable radio stations that suggest songs based on what you already like. But while the actual mechanics of the website haven’t changed much since it was launched, back in July of 2009 they decided to charge their most prolific listeners $0.99 if they went over 40 hours/month.

A year later, I’ve decided to figure out what’s in the future for Pandora, price-wise.

Continue Reading

As part of Pandora’s goal to incorporate the more social aspects of music into their streaming music service, the music discovery generator has partnered with social networking behemoth Facebook; by connecting a Pandora account to a Facebook account, the new update makes it easy to share Pandora stations and music discoveries between friends.

Continue Reading

Yesterday, Pandora founder Tim Westergren proclaimed on the Pandora Radio Blog that the service has stabilized its finances, and credited a recent agreement between artists, labels and webcasters to revise the US Copyright Royalty Board’s prices for online music streaming, ruled in 2007. On the downside, Pandora will no longer be free:

“The revised royalties are quite high – higher in fact than any other form of radio. As a consequence, we will have to make an adjustment that will affect about 10% of our users who are our heaviest listeners. Specifically, we are going to begin limiting listening to 40 hours per month on the free version of Pandora.”

What kind of adjustment? Westergren explains: Continue Reading

Listeners of Pandora’s Internet radio service can now view lyrics to songs while they play, thanks to a deal between Gracenote and Pandora announced yesterday. Pandora has 27 million registered users, and is looking to be profitable by 2010 through advertising.

“Lyrics are the most-requested piece of music-related information, and they are integral to the music experience,” said Ross Blanchard, Vice President of Business Development for Gracenote. “Now, through this agreement, Pandora users will have easy and direct access to the largest and highest quality database of authorized lyrics available in the industry.”

Continue Reading

The latest New York-based online radio company, Goom Radio, has secured $16 million from various venture capital firms, and is planning to “reinvent radio for the Internet generation”. However, it isn’t readily apparent how they are actually going about that mission.

The press release affirms that they have a “promising business model”, but doesn’t go into details on exactly what that model is, other than it’s ad-based. With free music available through many other similar services like Pandora, Last.fm, Spotify and the recent Free Music Archive, Goom Radio is going to have a difficult time rising above the competition.

Continue Reading

A new radio box called Livio is the first device to be designed around the Pandora online music service. The radio can also tune into more than 11,000 other radio stations, and costs $150. It works with a Wi-Fi connection, but can also be connected to the Internet with an Ethernet cable.

The Pandora interface is integrated in Livio, with built-in “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” buttons on the box and the remote control, so you can tell the station’s algorithm what to play next. You can also plug your iPod into the auxiliary input when you don’t have a connection.

Continue Reading

Well, to all people with a Blackberry, be prepared to be even more addicted to the darn thing. Pandora and Blackberry have teamed up to stream free music on your Blackberry. Pandora is an internet radio station that allows you to listen to your favorite artists and songs. If you like a particular artist or song, Pandora will find other music that is similar to it, giving you even MORE music to obsess over.

Blackberry users can now access and personalize their own Pandora Radio stations on the go. If you already use Pandora, you can access all of your existing stations on your Blackberry.  

Continue Reading

DropPlay, a new music service launched yesterday, combines the social nature of Facebook with the free streaming YouTube policy, and throws in a suggestion service like Pandora’s to boot. The service lets you search for any song, which streams as a YouTube player, and create and save playlists. The company claims it’s the “free online version of iTunes.”

DropPlay can be used directly from the web, which beats other music streaming competitors that require downloads, like Muziic. And even though other players like Seeqpod have Facebook applications, DropPlay is the first to fully integrate social networking on its frontpage. Here’s how:

Continue Reading