Music 102

Bored of that playlist you automatically reach for when you want music? Overwhelmed by the constantly changing industry? Confused by the visually over-stimulating portion of the internet that is supposed to be showing you new music? Or maybe you just aren’t very social and have never heard of Pandora? Whatever the case is, if you are looking for ways to find music that won’t cost you any money and are easy to work with, here are your answers. Happy searching.

Welcome to the Hype Machine, my absolute favorite and most used website. Hypem is unique because it serves as a funnel for the rest of the music blogosphere (or at least the important parts). When certain noteworthy blogs update new songs, they automatically feed into Hypem’s website. The songs get placed into the “Latest” tab, for members to peruse and judge. If you particularly enjoy a certain song, you can click the heart button and add it to your favorites. The songs that get the most clicks as favorites get transferred into the “popular” tab, which is where I suggest looking, and where there will be the best collection of new songs. www.hypem.com

Downsides: Extremely remix heavy (sometimes they are great but it gets extremely frustrating). Duplicate heavy (if two or more blogs update the same song they will all show up on Hypem).

Recently, you may have heard people talking about this new program called Spotify. Beginning in Sweden and now operating in about ten countries across the world, Spotify is an amazing service. Listeners can search through thousands of full, studio quality albums and stream them all for free. Legally. Tons of major record labels have agreed to let Spotify stream their music. Spotify is great for listening to new albums in their entirety without having to buy the whole thing. www.spotify.com

Downsides: Starting a couple months ago, unless you pay for a premium account you only have 10 hours of streaming per month. Don’t let this stop you, but just a heads up.

If you’re in the game of playlist making, you’re about to switch up your style (unless you’ve heard of this already, and now I just look foolish). Grooveshark has a massive library of music, and is a great place to build playlists. Create an account, assemble that playlist in the comfort of your own computer, then later log into that account on any other computer and start blasting those tunes. I also use it to create playlists I want to share with other people, which I do by sending them the username and password. They can then add songs to the playlists or create their own on the same account. It’s kind of like tapas food, great for sharing.  www.grooveshark.com

Downsides: A lot of poor quality songs, make sure you sample before adding to your playlist.

Sunset is one of my favorite music blogs. They have a great selection of hip-hop, indie, mashups and dubstep. Their team of about 5 or so writers does a fantastic job working together to ensure a constant source of new, good music. www.sunsetintherearview.com

Downsides? Good question, I can’t really think of any. I’m just really into this blog

Here’s a list of other blogs if you aren’t satisfied with all of this. Just google these names:

Pigeons and Planes – Pretty Much Amazing – Good Music All Day – Some Kind of Awesome