Library Guides: Online Music: Home

Welcome

All of the resources described in this LibGuide are free to the public.

Some of them have optional subscription modes that provide you with additional features for a monthly fee, but these are not required.

Worldwide Music

Freemium

Freemium is a business model by which a product or service (typically a digital offering such as software, media, games or web services) is provided free of charge, but a premium is charged for advanced features, functionality, or virtual goods.

The word "freemium" is a portmanteau combining the two aspects of the business model: "free" and "premium".

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemium

Online Resources

Click the "more..." link for more information about these services.

Grooveshark - Freemium
Grooveshark provides free music streaming, online radio stations, and lets you connect with artists and friends.
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Users can stream and upload music that can be played immediately or added to a playlist. Users can search and find music by song, artist, album, browsing friends’ recent activity, and even through other users’ playlists. The service allows users to create and edit Playlists. Registered users can save playlists to an account, subscribe to other users’ Playlists, and share Playlists through e-mail, social media, StumbleUpon, Reddit or an embeddable widget. Users can listen to Genre Radio Stations of particular genres or they can populate their own station via their list of Current Songs.
Last.fm - Freemium
Last.fm is a social music service that lets you discover new music you like, based on the music you already listen to.
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The Last.fm website is filled with tons of information on artists, albums and tracks, more music similar to them, charts and other statistics and more, all built by the Last.fm users who are keeping track of what they’re listening to with Last.fm.

You can read about artists you like, check out their most popular tracks, browse their album and find out what other artists are similar to them; learn about upcoming events, explore interesting genres, listen to music and watch videos.

To get the most out of Last.fm, sign up for a user profile – you can build up your personal user profile, write journal articles about your favourite music, create your own event calendar and invite friends, talk to other users and get together with them in groups about interesting topics.
List of Online Music Databases & Streaming Music Services
from Wikipedia
National Jukebox: Historical Recordings from the Library of Congress
Historical sound recordings
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This site was developed to provide access to historical sound recordings. The recordings digitized for the project are from labels owned by Sony Entertainment, which has granted the Library a limited no-cost license to use the materials. At present, the collection consists of approximately 10,000 Victor label recordings produced between 1901 and 1925, including repertoire from popular, folk, and operatic idioms.
Naxos Music Library
Search for specific composers, works, or keywords.
Pandora - Freemium
Pandora is an automated music recommendation service that plays music similar to music or artists/composers you like, based on data from the Music Genome Project.
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Together their team of musician-analysts has been listening to music, one song at a time, studying and collecting literally hundreds of musical details on every track - melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals, lyrics ... and more! Recommendations are then based on these qualities.

You can create up to 100 unique "stations." And you can even refine them. If it's not quite right you can tell it so and it will get better for you.
Rhapsody - Free Trial
Rhapsody is an online music store subscription service available in the United States only.
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Rhapsody is one of the largest American-based music file-sharing retail services, with more than 6 million songs in its library and about 750,000 paying users of its subscription-based service, according to company estimates.

Rhapsody's downloaded files come with restrictions on their use, enforced by Helix, a digital-rights management system owned by RealNetworks.
Slacker Radio - Freemium
Slacker Radio is an online music streaming service available in the US and Canada. It began life as the human-curated alternative to the pioneering, Music Genome Project-powered Pandora Internet Radio. Since then, however, Slacker has expanded to include news and weather updates, live ESPN radio, entertaining lifestyle channels, and well-conceived themed stations that are sure to delight music fans.
Spotify - Freemium (was Free Trial)
Spotify is a commercial music streaming service providing DRM-protected content from a range of major and independent record labels, including Sony, EMI, Warner Music Group and Universal. Currently maintaining free unlimited use.
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Music can be browsed by artist, album, record label, genre or playlist as well as by direct searches. On desktop clients, a link allows the listener to purchase selected material via partner retailers.

A six-month free trial period is activated upon Spotify account registration or first login with a Facebook account, where a user can listen to an unlimited amount of music supported by visual and radio-style advertising. After the trial, Spotify has a listening limit of 10 hours per month, divided into a 2.5 hour streaming allocation each week (with any unused hours carrying over to the next week). An "Unlimited" subscription removes advertisements and time limits and a "Premium" subscription introduces extra features such as higher bitrate streaming, offline access to music and mobile app access.
Yahoo! Music Radio (LaunchCast) - Freemium
Streaming music from Yahoo!

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