on-demand music

Get a quick and easy invitation to Spotify

By now you've probably heard about on-demand music service Spotify, which has finally arrived in the U.S. (As CNET's Donald Bell noted in his hands-on coverage of Spotify, "music fans have reason to cheer.") For now, however, it's invitation-only--and invitations have been very slow in coming.

Until now. Good old Coca-Cola is offering free Spotify invitations to anyone willing to supply an e-mail address. And I like the company's little privacy disclaimer:

"As much as Coke loves to share, we will NOT be giving your information to any third parties. Only Spotify … Read more

Slacker Premium Radio to offer on-demand music

Slacker Radio first launched in 2007 as an intuitive online music player that let you stream a variety of preprogrammed and custom-made radio stations based on your favorite artists and songs. Since then, the service has added a continuous array of new features, from its own short-lived devices to apps for your Blackberry and iPhone to Twitter feed functionality. Tonight at an event in New York, Slacker, Inc. will show off its latest offering: Premium Radio.

Slacker Premium Radio will offer all the features of Radio Plus--no ads, no skip limits, mobile station caching--with the added benefit of on-demand functionality. … Read more

Spotify adds two new levels of service

On-demand music service Spotify, which is currently available only in Europe, has been broadly praised by users (including me) for its large selection of music and exceptional responsiveness. Today, Spotify added two new levels of service: Open and Unlimited. The Open tier is more notable because, once again, it opens the service to users without an invitation.

The new levels are the latest step in Spotify's ongoing experiment to broaden its audience without compromising performance. When it launched in 2008, Spotify was free and offered unlimited streams to a PC, but an invitation was required. In February 2009, it … Read more

Grooveshark: On-demand tunes for your mobile

Grooveshark on Tuesday released a mobile app for Palm OS, bringing the experience of mobile on-demand music to Palm phones like the Pre, Pre Plus, and the Pixi for the first time. The Palm app joins Grooveshark Mobile versions for Android and BlackBerry (it doesn't work on the Storm), both of which were quietly released in early January.

If you're not familiar with Grooveshark, the concept is similar to Rhapsody or Spotify (which is not available in the U.S. yet): type in the name of just about any song, album, or artist, and you'll get a … Read more

Pick and play a song right now with Songerize

If you've got a song stuck in your head, this is the place to get it out (or make it worse through repeated plays). Go to Songerize, select a song name, artist, and hit play. That's it. No confusing interface, no sign-in screen, no extraneous information, no ads.

It doesn't find everything--in my quick tests, it had about a 50% success ratio, and completely failed on PiL and Jane's Addiction. But it found just about every pop and classic rock radio title I could think of.

(Thanks to Listening Post for the tip.)

Last.fm offers complete songs on demand

Like most online radio stations, Last.fm has been forced by music copyright owners to behave more or less like a traditional radio station. A highly customizable radio station--users could enter a favorite artist and Last.fm would pick a song by that artist, then add in songs from similar artists--but a radio station nonetheless. Content was pushed, not pulled. Users who wanted to pick songs to play on demand either had to download them from a service like iTunes or pay for a subscription service like Rhapsody (which does let you stream 25 songs a month for free).

Today, … Read more