Webware100

Site: Pandora.com
Category: Audio & Music

Pandora is a music discovery and recommendation service. Users can listen to tracks via a simplistic player, and if they like or dislike a song they can vote yes or no on it. If they don't like it, the service will automatically skip it and move onto something else. If they do like it, Pandora will pull up tracks it thinks are similar in style. With enough use, it can effectively introduce you to all sorts of new music, and users can make their own radio stations based on personal tastes.

The service makes its money from advertisements that are inserted every few songs, similar to terrestrial radio stations. There's also a subscription service that lets people skip and re-listen to songs from the playlists they can enjoy ad-free. Besides the Web, Pandora can also be found on mobile phones and home theater devices.

(Credit: CNET)

Site: Last.fm
Category: Audio & Music

Last.fm is a music discovery and listening service. It's got a wide range of tracks users can listen to and share with others. It also has a recommendation engine that will give you a list of artists it thinks you'll like, based your personal favorites. Users can make their own playlists and even share them with friends using the service's widget-making tool or Facebook application.

One of its more helpful services for music junkies is Scrobbling, which tracks the music you're listening to on your computer and sends the information to Last.fm. From there, everyone can look at what you've been listening to, how often you've listened to it, and give it a go themselves. Users also can have their own blogs where they can write about and reference music they're listening to, or just write about whatever they want.

Note: Last.fm is a part of CBS Interactive, which also publishes CNET News.

(Credit: CNET)

Site: Grooveshark.com
Category: Audio & Music

Grooveshark is a free online jukebox service. Users can search for tracks and listen to them right inside of a Web-based player. Similar to software jukebox applications, users of Grooveshark can control music tracks as if they were playing them right off a hard drive. It also lets you save and create playlists, and mark songs as favorites.

Grooveshark has two companion applications, a widget creator for sticking the GrooveShark player on blogs and social networking profiles, and a link shortening service for use on microblogging services like Twitter.

(Credit: CNET)

Site: Amazon.com/MP3
Category: Audio & Music

Amazon's MP3 store sells DRM-free MP3s of entire musical albums, ripped at a very high bit rate and with digital copies of the cover art. Because there's no DRM, the files can be played on any portable media player, which has helped Amazon become one the top five music sellers worldwide.

Tracks are available for sale individually or by the album. In order to complete a purchase on the store, users must install a small helper program that lets you download several tracks at the same time. It will also automatically take the tracks and add them to your iTunes and/or Windows Media Player libraries.

(Credit: CNET)

Site: JamLegend.com
Category: Audio & Music

JamLegend emulates console games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band by letting users play the guitar tracks on songs using their QWERTY keyboard. Users can play by themselves or with others, and have their scores tracked on community leaderboards.

For artists, JamLegend is a chance to make your music an interactive experience--and a profitable one, since the service links back to your band's site, or online stores where the track can be purchased.

(Credit: CNET)

Site: Apple.com/iTunes
Category: Audio & Music

iTunes is Apple's jukebox software and a gateway to Apple's online media store and portable devices like iPods and iPhones. It's currently in its eighth release, and now features a built-in recommendation tool that can create playlists based on listening habits from your library, as well as other iTunes users.

The software started out as Mac-only, but became cross-platform with Windows shortly after Apple realized that it could make more money from music and movie sales than with iPods alone.

(Credit: CNET)

Site: Lala.com
Category: Audio & Music

Lala is a music service that lets users listen right inside of the browser. It blends a discovery engine with an online marketplace to let you explore new music and buy the MP3 for playing offline. It also has a service that scans your existing library for tracks in its collection to let you play them from any computer. Tracks that don't match up can be uploaded, so you can still listen to them.

Lala's most famous for its paid streaming service, where users can stream any track once, for free. After that, 10 cents gets you the rights to stream it as much as you want, which covers the license and the cost to get it to you. It's not like purchasing a copy of the track outright, but a whole lot cheaper.

(Credit: CNET)

Site: NexusRadio.com
Category: Audio & Music

Nexus Radio (download) is a free music software application that lets users download music and listen to streaming radio stations. It also doubles as a media player, and recording tool which can record in-line audio from your computer, or from the radio streams you're listening to.

Like competing music jukebox software, Nexus Radio has its own plug-in architecture that allows third parties to create their own add-ons. One of the most popular applications of that has been visualizations, which users are able to add or remove from the player.

(Credit: CNET)