Webware

Although there are a slew of music-streaming services across the Web, they're not created equal. But if you find the right service to match your music style, you'll quickly realize that finding the best song for a particular occasion isn't as hard as it once was.

Grooveshark

Including Grooveshark in the list of the top five music-streaming services may surprise some since it doesn't get the kind of attention Last.fm or Pandora does. But with the help of an outstanding search interface that lets users find a slew of songs by artist, album, or song, as well as a slick, Flash-based interface, it's one of the best streaming music services around.

Overall, the site's recommendation engine is outstanding and the relevance of the tracks it offered was superb. The ability to embed songs elsewhere across the Web with Grooveshark widgets is a nice touch, but the main issue facing Grooveshark is that its library is a bit too small. Sure, the company claims it offers a library of "millions" of songs, but many are duplicates and after listening for about 20 minutes or so, I heard the same songs again when I left the recommendation engine running. To limit that issue, I decided to create my own playlist of songs without using the recommendation engine. It allowed me to skip back to songs I had already heard and although it took more work than I would have liked, the experience was far more appealing that using the company's recommendation engine.

Last FM

Last.fm is great for the social-networking fanatic in all of us and its library of songs is superb. In fact, the service is equally capable of finding Louis Prima's "Angelina Zooma Zooma" as Coldplay's "Viva La Vida." Last.fm might just be another place to create a radio station to listen to songs that sound similar to your favorites, but it's the social element that adds appeal to the service. The ability to find out what friends are listening to is a welcome feature and the ease with which you can find songs makes Last.fm one of the easiest services to use.

There's not much to dislike about Last.fm. The service is simple to use, it offers extras like videos and lyrics to sweeten the pot, and generally does well when offering up new songs. But it's that recommendation engine that doesn't perform quite as well as Pandora's that takes away somewhat from the Last.fm experience. During my testing, the service did well on newer, more popular songs, but on more obscure tracks, it had difficulty delivering related songs. But if you're not into less-known artists or indie labels, I doubt you'll even notice.

Editor's note: Last.fm is owned by CBS, which also publishes CNET and CNET News. The author of this post is a freelance contributor to CNET, and his views on these products are his own.

MySpace Music

A relatively new entrant to the market, MySpace Music has quickly become one of the most appealing music streaming services on the Web. Its library of music is huge--it features songs from all the major labels and independents--and learning more about the artist and song was made easy thanks to MySpace's wealth of information for each track. Unlike Pandora, I was able to pick any songs I wished from the company's library and add it to a playlist that I could play an unlimited number of times. That may be a simple addition, but being able to repeat songs and choosing to play any one of the millions of tracks the service offers is an extremely appealing feature.

The main issue plaguing MySpace Music, though, is its poor interface that makes it too difficult to find music, create playlists, and get down to the business of listening to music. I realize the service is full of features, which is probably why it's so difficult for the company to cram all of it onto a page in a neat way, but something needs to be done to fix it before it can truly compete on the same level with well-designed services like Pandora and Last.fm.

Pandora

Pandora is easily one of the best music services on the Web. With a huge library of songs, an outstanding interface, and the best recommendation engine in the business, the service is a fine alternative to Last.fm. And with the help of a simple "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" system to tell the service if you like a song, Pandora's ability to find related songs that you actually enjoy is second to none.

But as appealing as its music service is, it's the general lack of social features that takes away from an otherwise outstanding service. Monitoring what your friends are listening to is practically impossible and connecting to others to share music is missing. Granted, the service, which is based off the Genome Project, specializes in providing music first and foremost, but as one of Last.fm's main competitors, it seems silly to me that a more appealing social element isn't included.

Rhapsody

Rhapsody may be one of the oldest services in the music streaming business, but it still packs quite a punch. Aside from playing songs, Rhapsody displays lyrics for most songs and I was even able to perform a few tunes myself thanks to karaoke tracks included in its library. And regardless of whether I was looking for the Velvet Underground or Britney Spears, I found any song I wanted without much trouble, thanks to a slick interface and a library of songs that's one of the largest on the market.

But for all its virtues, the biggest issue facing Rhapsody is its business model. To gain full access to its entire library of songs an unlimited number of times, as well as other features the service has to offer like personalized playlists, it requires users to dole out at least $12.99 per month. The company's free offering allows users to play 25 songs for free each month, but that limit dries up quickly. And considering most of the Rhapsody's competitors offer the same music for free, I'm hard-pressed to find a reason to use it when Pandora and Last.fm are providing their own, free alternative.

It's been a good seven months since Yahoo killed off its own music service in favor of teaming up with RealNetworks' Rhapsody. The evolution of this partnership finally surfaced on Yahoo's search results late Wednesday evening. Now any time you do a search for an artist or song name you'll be able to play up to four of their tracks, in full length, right from the results. Previously the system only allowed for 30-second previews.

The updated service allows for up to 25 full-length plays per month, although users who sign up to be a part of Rhapsody's $13-a-month subscription service can get unlimited streaming plays. The music plays from the built-in Yahoo Media Player the company is calling FoxyPlayer. It automatically keeps track of how many plays you've had and includes shortcuts to the source album, lyrics, and artist page. Once you move off the page the player disappears, so if you want to keep listening you have to leave that window or tab open.

The music artist shortcut box that appears on the top of your search results now lets you play full-length songs, which works well on many major artists except Oasis, which for some reason is limited to karaoke tracks.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

In my testing I found the player to be excellent, however Yahoo's system is still fragmented. Using Yahoo's audio search still provides short samples that play without the benefit of the player, and the basic search does not always pick up your artists, despite them being in Yahoo Music's catalog.

In the case of a big band like Oasis the only full-length tracks available were karaoke samples; once played, they still counted toward the 25-song monthly cap. When I wanted to see other songs in the collection it hopped me over to the download page where you could only listen to 30-second samples, something that will be switching over to full-length tracks "soon" according to a post on Yahoo's search blog.

All of this jumping around is bound to be confusing to the average user unless they're looking for big-name bands. Going forward, the most powerful option is going to be a player that follows you from page to page and smarter recognition of band names that are pulled up when users are searching.

Update: Made a correction regarding the FoxyPlayer being related to technology from Foxytunes.

Facebook's favorite music service, iLike, has officially launched its developer platform. The company first hinted at this several months ago and CNET News reported last week that it was nearing its debut. With the platform, approved developers will be able to access the iLike API and work it into their own sites.

"We've always adopted a strategy of syndication, of going where the consumers are instead of trying to bring them to us," CEO Ali Partovi told CNET News on Tuesday. Indeed, iLike launched first an iTunes plugin and then a Facebook application to spread its product around. Partovi said that it was "natural" for iLike to go for a developer platform strategy after becoming so successful as a platform app itself.

But there's an interesting twist to iLike's platform: it's specifically focused on making iLike playlists available and openly collaborative. That's evident in the list of launch partners: the forthcoming Connected Weddings application on Facebook, for example, will let wedding guests add to a suggested song playlist; the Flixster movies application will use iLike's API to let members build movie soundtracks to accompany the film's page in the Flixster directory; the set of TV-fan apps built by Watercooler will let fans also construct the soundtrack that played in the background in any episode of a given TV show. Other partners include Classtop.com, the Social Gaming Network's Free Gifts application, Slide's FunSpace, Jambool, Mesmo.com, and Zimride's Carpools application.

The partners don't end with social applications, either: IAC's Evite will be using iLike's API for a "playlist" tab on each invitation, so that guests can build a party soundtrack, and both TypePad and Google have built embeddable blog widgets to incorporate music.

Playlists are hot, and not just because teen quasi-heartthrob Michael Cera is about to star in a movie about them. The forthcoming MySpace Music heavily features playlist creation, and start-up Muxtape caught on as a hipster sensation before being pulled under mysterious circumstances that likely involved the RIAA. Several other social music services also offer playlist features--Imeem has been doing it for years.

iLike's playlists, as with the rest of the music on the site, have full-length streaming songs available in collaboration with subscription service Rhapsody. That means that you can listen to 25 songs for free before needing to sign up for a Rhapsody account (if you don't, you're restricted to 30-second samples). Imeem and MySpace Music, on the other hand, offer fewer restrictions on free full-length playback.

It's not perfect, mostly because the music is restricted to what's available in iLike's library. While testing out the app I could only access one of the two albums by one of my favorite bands, the Fratellis, and I'm sure there are plenty more instances of missing albums and artists.

But music fans, not to mention iLike's partners, have reason to be psyched: this is a legitimately cool feature. And the struggling Rhapsody, which has been unable to really eat into iTunes' market share, could get a handful of new subscribers out of it: you know, when tipsy party guests wonder why song No. 26 on their Evite playlist won't play, and are more than willing to cough up a subscription fee to keep the beat going.

We swear, there's no reading required to expand your musical horizons these days. Well...aside from this article, at least.

(Credit: Donald Bell/CNET Networks)

When you're young, new music is everywhere: radio, Facebook profiles, borrowed iPods, or even burned CDs. It's not hard to find tunes you love. The music appetites of 13- to 21-year-olds are voracious and the consequences of being musically unhip can be punishing.

Then something happens: you get older; work a full-time job; get married; have a mortgage; have children; adopt a particularly demanding parrot; and so on. You wake up one day and realize your taste in music hasn't budged since your early '20s and the prospect of discovering good, new music now seems like an overwhelming chore, fraught with disappointment. I know, I'm living proof.

We're all familiar with the long, depressing list of activities that seemed easy in youth that now take effort. Fortunately, finding good music isn't as tough as working off that middle-age gut. Since its inception, the Internet has helped us--mostly illegally--discover new music. Finally, tools for legal and efficient online music discovery are hitting their stride.

To help you help yourself, we've collected our favorite techniques to help the lazy, hurried, or unhip (or, face it, aging) connect with good, new music.

MTV might've strayed away from music these days--My Super Sweet Sixteen, anyone?--but the entertainment mainstay's latest project aims to both bring it back to its roots and propel it into the social Web. Ambitious, yes.

'The Hills': Now telling you what you want to listen to.

(Credit: MTV)

It's called "Soundtrack," and it's an "interactive music guide for TV." If you're watching a heated moment of cattiness between Lauren and Audrina on The Hills and are dying to know what song's playing in the background, you can log on and find out exactly what it was. Then you can purchase the MP3, thanks to MTV's partnership with music service Rhapsody, as well as look up more soundtrack information from past programming. You can, of course, network with other members--this is powered by Flux, the social-networking technology that MTV Networks parent company Viacom built when it acquired a start-up called Tagworld.

Radio stations have been doing the "look up a song" gimmick for years, which makes it not particularly jaw-dropping for MTV to institute the same thing. But it does tap into a host of extremely popular and influential cable shows (for better or for worse) and cross-promotion on TV will likely boost traffic. Plus, it should be said that television soundtracks have become a crucial spot for music discovery--remember when The O.C. propelled California indie-pop bands to the heights of coolness a few years ago?

But MTV also hopes that Soundtrack, which will be worked into the main MTV.com site soon, will become an important promotional hub. There's a ranking of the top songs and artists--and it's a lot more obscure than iTunes or MTV's own TRL charts--and indie bands can create profiles to amass fans.

The indie band promotion may remind you a bit of PureVolume, which thrived for a while as a music promotion and discovery site before MySpace and an army of popular music blogs far surpassed it in influence. And MTV, too, has heretofore been a series of misses in the Web 2.0 space: Viacom lost out to News Corp. in the bidding for MySpace, which had fast become the Web's center for finding new music. The company also failed to jump on the music blog trend, which start-up Buzznet has quickly been amassing. The Twittering Moon Man didn't do much either.

Soundtrack, however, is MTV's most targeted and relevant Web 2.0 effort yet, and will likely be an appreciated attempt to bring at least some of the network's focus back to music. Considering how many people watch The Hills, it could make a difference.

Let's also hope MTV somehow ties Soundtrack into its most shining success of the digital age: video game Rock Band.

Lala.com has a history of coming up with innovative ideas that don't quite conquer the world. The company is best known for its online used-CD trading service, which is an interesting idea but works well only if you have a large list of CDs available to trade.

Lala.com will let you stream any song once at no charge, and an unlimited number of times for $0.10 per song.

(Credit: Lala.com)

It also offers a music "locker" service that allows you to upload your music then listen to it from any computer with an Internet connection...but it only works with MP3 files, so you're out of luck if you've been using (for example) iTunes to rip your CDs to AAC for the last four years. The site was also early to experiment with offering free streaming files, but has apparently shuttered that service because the numbers didn't work out.

Now the company's beta-testing another streaming service that lets you select any song to stream once. Then, if you want to stream it again, you can pay a one-time fee of $0.10 and get perpetual streaming rights to it.

Unfortunately, this pay-per-song streaming model occupies a weird space halfway between all-you-can-eat subscription services and the free streaming files available elsewhere. If I'm a hardcore music fan who likes to discover and listen to lots of new music online, I'll probably subscribe to a service like Rhapsody--one monthly payment gets me streaming access to all the music I want. But if I just want instant gratification--say, for example, I need to hear Iron Maiden's "Run to the Hills" right now--I can turn to Imeem, or Last.fm, or the Songerize site (which uses the Seeqpod search engine to discover music files all over the Web, then provides a simple embedded player).

So who would pay $0.10 for unlimited rights to stream a particular song? Probably people who are already using the Lala.com digital locker and want a cost-effective way to add new music to it without having to seek it out online or rip it from a CD and then upload it manually.

It's been a tumultuous few days for Yahoo--you know, with that takeover bid from Microsoft--but the company continues to shake things up internally, too.

On Monday, the company announced that it will discontinue its Yahoo Music Unlimited subscription service and will transfer its customers to RealNetworks' Rhapsody service.

In mid-2008, Yahoo Music Unlimited subscribers will be guided through an in-browser process to convert their music libraries to Rhapsody's service. For a limited time (length unknown), they'll be able to keep paying Yahoo's subscription fees, which cap out at $8.99 per month, before being required to start paying Rhapsody's $12.99 monthly fee.

Additionally, Yahoo announced in conjunction that it has acquired FoxyTunes, a browser plug-in that is compatible with multiple desktop and Web-based music players.

RealNetworks, which acquired Rhapsody when it purchased parent Listen.com for $36 million in 2003, has been partnering with both hardware manufacturers like TiVo and media companies like Viacom's MTV Networks. It's the company's best strategy for staying afloat in a digital music landscape that's not only dominated by Apple's iTunes but also seems to be gravitating toward "free," not subscription-based models.

But the announcement with Yahoo is shrouded in uncertainty, for obvious reasons. Just about anything could happen to Yahoo if Microsoft's proposed $44.6 billion acquisition goes through.

RealNetworks, ironically, has a hostile history with Microsoft, too, dating back to an antitrust scuffle several years ago that led to a partnership in which RealNetworks ultimately claimed it was shortchanged.

An extended outage at RealNetworks' Rhapsody music service has locked out an unknown number of users for the second time since March.

While the earlier problem prevented some customers from accessing the site for up to two weeks, this time executives don't know when the problem will be corrected. A handful of Rhapsody users complained on the company's message boards this week that they haven't been able to log on since Friday.

"It's a known issue," said Justine Navaja, a company spokesperson. "We don't know yet when it will be fixed, but it's only affecting a small group of users. We're doing what we can to make sure it gets fixed as soon as possible."

RealNetworks, which competes with Yahoo Music, Napster, and other subscription services, isn't saying whether the glitches are related or what caused them.

Meanwhile, Josh Solera, a Rhapsody customer from Boston, worries that unless the company corrects the problem soon, he'll be cut off from his music.

Songs downloaded off of sites like Rhapsody and Yahoo Music, are restricted by digital rights management. Licenses in the song files must be updated and that can only happen if customers are allowed to sync their computers to the service's Web site. If they can't sync within a specified time, then their music automatically locks up.

Solera, a management consultant, joined Rhapsody in October 2006 and downloads all the songs he wants for a monthly fee. On Tuesday, he tried numerous times to log on but only received error messages.

To make amends, Rhapsody issued Solera a two-week subscription credit. That may not be enough to make him happy. He said that a series of less dramatic but annoying technical issues have worn on his patience. He likes his Zen music player but the problems at Rhapsody have almost convinced him to swap it for an iPod.

"If I could get a subscription service from iTunes, I would sign up in a minute," Solera said. "I think a lot of people would."

Rhapsody, the subscription music service owned by RealNetworks, has teamed up with music blog network and social networking site Mog.com to provide, well, music.

Through this partnership, songs mentioned on Mog's blogs are accompanied by a yellow "play" button that allows users to access the full-length streaming file through Rhapsody, which offers a total of about 4.5 million independent and major-label songs in its catalog. "We couldn't be more excited to have Rhapsody enabling music listening on MOG," Mog founder and CEO David Hyman said in a joint press release. "With today's release, MOG has put more key pieces in place towards its goal of building the ultimate online music community."

Rhapsody's full-length song playback is also now integrated into Mog's "Mog-o-Matic" downloadable music discovery software, creating playlists of recommended music based on what you play on your computer or portable music player. It's social, too--you can listen to not only your playlist, but also those created by members of your friends' list on Mog. In addition, Mog users can create custom playlists of Rhapsody songs, much like Imeem's streaming lineups.

New versions of Mog-o-Matic have been released in conjunction for both the Mac and Windows operating systems; the company touts them as faster, more efficient, and more stable. At the same time, Mog has souped up its music search feature, redesigned its artist and album pages, and tweaked its page layout.

But don't hold your breath--this Rhapsody-Mog deal isn't free. Mog members can access the Rhapsody streaming songs for a 14-day free trial, after which point they have to sign up for Rhapsody's subscription service ($12.99 per month) or a 25-songs-per-month deal.

Rhapsody's subscription-based music service has, thus far, proven unable to compete with Apple's ubiquitous iTunes. As a result, the RealNetworks-owned service has attempted to compete by forging partnerships across the digital-media landscape: an impending music store deal with MTV Networks and an appearance on TiVo set-top boxes, for example.

Unfortunately for Rhapsody, it still hasn't been able to create much of a dent in the iTunes arsenal. Nevertheless, the deals keep rolling in.