Listening to music online has been there for a long time... but since a long time nothing new has happened. The last time things were hot in the online music world was when MP3 format was launched and then when Napster was launched as a peer to peer music spreading engine... The music big bosses shut them down. But now there are some interesting things happening. http://www.smashitsusa.com/ , http://www.raaga.com/ , http://radio.smashits.com/ and others been there since a while. Then came www.in.com for online high quality Hindi music listening.
www.mixturtle.com is one of my fav music search engine. The new www.justhearit.com is also very efficient. http://www.plorf.com is another place for easy search and song downloads.
As a music lover, one of my favorite innovations of the last five years or so has come in the form of music discovery services. Services like ilike.com, Last.fm, Pandora, Rhapsody and iTunes 8 have made it easy to find artists or songs that are similar to your musical tastes and preferences. The only problem with these services, is that they are based on limited databases (like the iTunes Music Store, for iTunes's Genius Mode), reviews or ratings by other users and overall popularity. That means that the music discovered might indeed be similar, but it really limits results to mainsream songs and generic genre distinctions. This is great for an automatic playlist, but not so great for really finding new bands or artists.This is why Mufin's new music discovery engine is so unique; it analyzes the actual structure of the song, not just the genre meta-data. Mufin's discovery engine just entered private beta, but Download Squad readers can get in on the action by using this invite link: http://beta.mufin.com/start?ic=e75eecf85a4a547ca9379d6f8b6c23bb.
http://beta.mufin.com/start?ic=73c9965de675083353d85d4218b808e3
Co-developed at the Fraunhofer Institute (the creators of the MP3 format), Mufin uses audio recognition technology to analyze the actual musical characteristics of a song. Mufin creates a unique "fingerprint" for each song, using 40 characteristics like tempo, instruments, rhythm structure and sound density. Then, when you search for a song in Mufin's database, an alogrithm compares the fingerprint of that song against the database and presents you with results of songs that are similar in structure.
