Online Music Services

finetune.com is a new online music service, that I spent way too much time yesterday playing with. They have stolen the very best features from others into one engaging experience. The way finetune works by the creation of playlists, similar to Apple's iMix. Once you log in, you can create a playlist of 45 songs. It seems like a lot, but they have an I'm Lazy button that will fill out the rest based on the artists already in your list. The website is rocksolid, I noticed only a few bugs. The Flash-based interface of album covers is also iTunes-esque. They have a 30-second preview button for every song, it works much more seemlessly than Amazon's preview feature. Another nice thing about the preview button is that the music is automatically faded or mixed into the current track. This feature, unexpectedly, allows me to compare the music with what's already in my playlist. It helps me to hear if the song will fit in. This feature is as robust as the one that I like at the music kiosks at Barnes & Noble. Better than that, I get to record what I like and hear the full song. I'm still trying to remember a few songs/artists that I heard at B&N that never got written down. The catalog seems pretty full, although a few indie artists and rap groups were either not well represented or there at all. For now, I like it better than AllofMP3 the russian music download store because it's easier to test-drive songs within the context of my other songs in a playlist. I use it for pop songs, indie bands, rappers and world music that generally have a shelf life of a few months for me. The last thing is the social network aspect. While certainly not a unique feature, I found it much better to look at other playlists and similar bands for songs than using the search box, which requires the specific not fuzzy search process. In the end, this is the best experience at me building the top-40 radio station of my choosing. Thanks to Pop Candy's Whitney Mathewson for the heads up.

Pandora is an online music service that provides music recommendations based on artists or songs. Derived from the Music Genome Project, Pandora serves up song based on the "genetic makeup" of the thing that you are searching for. I stopped using the site, a few months ago. The music stations I created tended to throw me off. First, individually they sounded too boring for me. Although I liked the song the station is created on, I kind of like variety, but more than that I just want to hear the song that I like. The Quickmix feature came along, I thought this would solve the problem. It mixed songs from the group of stations I had created. Because I like to listen to music while I work. Being served a song that I hadn't heard forced me to listen, drawing my attention away. Overall, it just didn't work for me. Thanks to Adam Barea for the heads up.

PodShow is different than Finetune and Pandora so it's a bit hard for me to explain. But it is another place to listen to music online. PodShow is really a podcast media company. They work with or run the Podsafe network, where musicians can upload their music. This is the equivalent of the podcasts section of the iTunes store. They have both professionally produced and locally produced podcasts. I have explored too much, but I found a hip hop podcast called D4E Hip Hop Mixtape. The "pj" rummages through the Podsafe network and remixes the songs into a 20 minute "mixtape". There no way I could find such artistry anywhere else. Anyway, I find PodShow's interface very confusing, so I don't really spend a lot of time roaming around. There is just too much for me to sift through. Thanks to Stanford's Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders podcast for interviewing Ron Bloom, co-founder of PodShow, and Ray Lane, venture capitalist.