Posts tagged free napster

I’ve been debating lately with other people I know what music service is the best on the web. I naturally decided to do a comparison of the 3 services – Pandora, Free Napster, and Grooveshark – on the blog to give the facts about each.

After going to the website, you are immediately asked what artist or song you want to create a “station” from, you hear something from the band or the song, then you listen to a song that has similar music “genes” or “DNA” to the previous song. In layman’s terms, you can hear song after song of music that has similar qualities, such as “hard rock roots” or “repetitive melodic phrasing.” Anyone that I have talked to agrees that Pandora is the best service for finding new bands, but Pandora has its downfalls too. For one, you can only skip about 5 songs an hour, which I find can be annoying. Another thing is that you can’t repeat or rewind a song, you hear it once and you’re done. Overall, if you’re looking for another band or two to add to your collection, go with Pandora.

Grooveshark is a very unique service in the way that you can buy music. Users upload their music (it doesn’t matter where it came from, as long as it doesn’t have DRM on it) and Grooveshark adds it to the online collection. From there, whenever another person buys a song for $0.99 cents, the uploader gets $0.30 cents towards buying music, Grooveshark keeps about $0.04 cents, and the rest goes to the recording studio. The creators of Grooveshark hope that their service will encourage people to listen to music online and buy it if they like it, knowing that their money isn’t being sent to the wrong people (looking at iTunes here). I like Grooveshark’s initiative, but I’m skeptic about it being a commonly used service to purchase music at.

Lastly, we have Free Napster, and if you don’t know about Napster’s history, it’s some great reading. Free Napster lets you search through their extensive library of music and listen to it for free online like the previous services. What Free Napster nails is the listening part; you can listen to single songs, albums, or anything from one band at a time. The only thing that keeps this service from totally rocking is that some songs are only 0:30 second previews. I’ll admit this is rare, but it is very annoying when you come across a whole band’s library of previews. If you’re looking for your music fix from one or two bands, Free Napster is the way to go.

All in all, I would crown the winner to be Pandora. I mean, I’ve been using it the whole time I was writing this post because I love finding new bands that sound like the ones I already love. Whatever service you go with, just be aware of the limitations and advantages before you start saying it will take over the Internet world with its pwnage.