Webware100

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 relisten to songs from the playlists they can enjoy ad-free. Pandora recently rolled out Pandora for mobile devices, as well as a home version for people with the Sonos music system.

Winner: Pandora (Pandora.com)
Category: Audio

Live365 is an online radio directory with thousands of stations of free, streaming music. In addition to its free offerings, Live365 offers a premium VIP service that charges anywhere from $5 to $8 a month for commercial-free streams that have a higher bitrate.

You've probably listened to a Live365 stream before and not even known it. Its streams are used on software programs such as Windows Media Player and Winamp, as well as on hardware like TiVo. Mobile phone users can also install the Live3650 application that will stream music over their cellular data network if they're away from a PC.

We like this service because it's an incredibly easy way to listen to and discover new music. The mobile integration is especially cool because it will let you bookmark tracks you like so you can download or look them up when you get back to your machine.

Winner: Live365 (Live365.com)
Category: Audio

Last.fm is a music discovery and listening service owned by CBS Interactive. It's got a wide range of tracks users can listen to and share with others. It also has a handy 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.

In early 2008 Last.fm finally got licensed, full-length tracks to stream as part of a deal with all four of the major record labels. The tracks are supported by ads, although users are now also getting the added benefit of some of CBS' 140-plus radio stations that shuffle up their catalogs.

Winner: Last.fm (Last.fm)
Category: Audio

iTunes is Apple's software jukebox. It started out as a Mac-only app before making its way to Windows users in late 2003. The software will let you manage photos, videos, and music files on your computer, then sync them up with Apple's array of portable media players.

People have mixed opinions of iTunes since it's only been open to Apple branded devices like the iPod and iPhone instead of being open to many competing devices as a platform. Despite this, it was one of the first mainstream programs to offer Internet radio and CD-ripping free of charge in a time while other jukebox software providers were not.

One of the reasons it's free is the inclusion of the iTunes Store, which lets users buy music, TV shows, audio books and movies, as well as subscribe and browse podcasts. This year, Apple unveiled the iTunes rental store, which forgoes the usual $10 purchase fees for films and lets users rent them for a limited period of time for about a third of the cost.

Winner: iTunes (Apple.com/iTunes)
Category: Audio

iLike is a music recommendation service that gives you 30-second clips of music tracks as well as links to buy them. It uses Google's Video search to pull up related videos of whatever song you're listening to, in case you want to listen to the whole song. While you could achieve similar search results just by using Google, it's an easier way listen and explore.

The service may be best known for its skyrocketing growth as a part of Facebook's apps platform launch. In just two weeks, the service garnered over 2 million users and now maintains more than 3 percent of the activity on the site and a whopping 370,000-plus daily users.

One of our favorite features is that you can download a small application that links to iTunes and monitors your music listening and collection. It will take this information and compare it to your friends, giving both of you recommendations based on tastes. That information can be used to help match you with others people, or to connect artists to their biggest fans.

Winner: iLike (iLike.com)
Category: Audio

Finetune is a music discovery service that launched in late 2006 and is focused on letting its users build sharable playlists of popular music. You're able to browse and search through a fairly large directory of popular artists and pick out full versions of their songs based on 30-second previews. There's also a really simple music discovery system that automatically builds playlists for you based on your artist picks.

In addition to its Web-based player, Finetune also has a gorgeous application for Adobe Air that both Mac and PC users can run on their machines. It lets you listen to both your Finetune and iTunes playlists, as well as search by name for artists you're into and get a custom radio station of their work.

Winner: Finetune (Finetune.com)
Category: Audio

eMusic has been around since 1998 and serves up indie tracks to paying subscribers who can purchase songs for about a third of the price found on major digital music providers. While you won't find tracks from the Billboard Top 100 on eMusic, there are a ton of great songs to fill up your MP3 player (legally) and give a generous portion of what you're paying to the artists who are making the music.

In addition to the popularity charts that help people see what's hot on the service, eMusic also maintains a section of playlists and recommendations, similar to those on iTunes, that's curated by humans.

Winner: eMusic (eMusic.com)
Category: Audio

BlogTalkRadio is an audio service that lets people broadcast their own Internet radio shows. Anyone can make a radio show using nothing more than a telephone and their browser and have it hosted for archiving and distributing on their blog or to friends. Hosts can even tape a show with other cohosts and get call-ins from listeners who can call a special phone number. Once the show is finished recording it's distributed as a podcast that users can subscribe to in their favorite podcatcher.

The service is supported entirely by advertising. Audio advertisements are inserted, live, in the audio stream; the host gets a warning on his or her console before the ads play, so he or she is able to gracefully cut to the commercial. BlogTalkRadio will split ad revenues 50-50 with the podcast hosts.

Winner: BlogTalkRadio (BlogTalkRadio.com)
Category: Audio

Amazon's MP3 store has had a banner year. The service sells DRM-free MP3s of entire musical albums, ripped at a very high bitrate and with digital copies of the cover art. The service offers over 2 million tracks that are available for sale individually or by the album. In order to download albums, 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.

Because there's no DRM, the files can be played on any portable media player, which has helped Amazon jump to within the top five music sellers worldwide. Also, starting in January, Amazon signed a deal with Sony BMG that gave the music store access to all four major record labels, bringing it up to spec with its competitor, Apple's iTunes.

Winner: Amazon MP3 (AmazonMP3.com)
Category: Audio