Sound - Making or listening to music together

I don't really care about sharing music or making music. I want to listen to music. That said, I checked out several of the sites.

Mog - annoying, you have to download Rhapsody to listen to the music. Other sites just let you play music without the hassle.
Project Playlist didn't interest me. I couldn't find a place to find out how to play the whole song. Their help page wasn't, and their terms of service was a blank page, and the ads were annoying.
Phling doesn't appeal to me either. Don't care to use phone minutes to listen to music.
I went to JamStudio and played a little bit. You would need patience and a lot of time to play around and make music. Just not my thing.
I like Imeem for letting me build playlists. It let's me choose specific songs. However, you are hoping someone has put the song or artist on the site. Found some light classical. I like this. Pandora is still great for finding and listening to music, but this is another choice. Somewhat limiting. It also lists what I've downloaded on my page. I'm not sure how it tagged my contacts from gmail to try to get me to add them as friends. Don't like that.

So I learned some new sites for music and not sure that I have any interest in sharing or creating music, but it's good to know there are sites out there.

Sound - downloading & burning

Several of the free sites have music that I like and will burn to cd. I also like Amazon's pay site. They have a lot of music I want and I can choose the songs and there is no DRM restrictions on their music. Most songs are about $1 and that's reasonable to me.

I finally got my cd burned. I had downloaded several songs. I figured I might as well burn something I could listen to. I only had a little trouble moving songs from my music file to the burn list. After that it was easy.

As far as sharing/downloading music online, I think the Electronic Frontier Foundation has a good idea with their white paper, A Better Way Forward: Voluntary Collective Licensing of Music File Sharing. Charge a flat monthly rate to download and make it more economical for people to pay than to steal. This would also allow small bands with no chance of signing with a big company the chance to get their music heard and get paid for it. The whole trying to find music pirates and prosecuting them would cease to be an issue. Added benefit, put a lot of lawyers out of that part of the business. They can go bother someone else.

NextGen - Sound of Music

Starting the next version of iHCPL.

I have already done some listening to music on the internet. I really like Pandora. You can have many stations with different kinds of music and the option to not like something.

I have not done any of the pay sites. On different blogs, people have really liked Rhapsody. You can listen online, download to an mp3 or burn to a disc for a reasonable price. And checking some of the obscure people I listen to, I found them listed. I just don't know if I would find enough to make it worth while to subscribe to. They do have 3 levels depending on what you want to do. Or you can just buy songs for a set price.

Yahoo Music appears to marketed to younger people, though they did have my artists listed. One nice extra was a 'Similar Artist' listing. A handy feature. Both seem to have similar payment options and both require a download of their software. Again, you can buy songs.

Napster also seems similar, but you can't get more info than is on their homepage without registering.

iTunes is proprietary and I pretty much don't care.

Amazon also looks good. It does let you use either WMP or iTunes to play. It also just has a flat price for songs, you don't have to pay a monthly subscription which is nice. And they have my artists. And another singer that it may be worth it to buy songs that I want without having to subscribe to anything. And they can be burned. Yeah!

The free site, music.download.com, has a more limited selection, which is not unexpected. They have one of the artisits I like, but just a few selections. It does list similar artists and it's FREE! and you can download. I went in and found a song I liked and downloaded it to our MP3 player. I already have a player and have downloaded music on to it in the past.

Most of the radio stations I listen to have online sites to listen to music, or to find out what has been playing. Still the main place I listen to the radio is in the car.

I am glad to find out about the password checker site. I am going to be changing passwords on some of my personal sites. I don't think I feel secure enough to put any of them on the web.

I had already starting using my gmail account for all the websites I signed up for because they don't have a size limit.