Links

Just some favorites...

The Best Music Sites (General)

  • Amazon
    An unimaginative choice for the top spot, but this is the best overall music site on the web. It includes the widest selection anywhere, extensive listener reviews, 256kbps downloads (better than Apple) and best of all, Listmania, a great source of exploration inspiration.        
  • The All Music Guide
    A staggering site. Hundreds of thousands of artist and album listings, extensive reviews, the whole shebang. It does suffer from heavy traffic day and night, though, so be patient with the page loads. It's worth it.
  • Rate Your Music
    The content here is almost entirely user-generated. Folks apply star-ratings to their albums; this site aggregates the results. The result is good artist discographies with thumbnail comparatives, and as a bonus this is an excellent repository of album cover art.

The Best Music Sites (Discovery)

  • Rhapsody
    This outfit offers the best music discovery tool there is. For the cost of about one new CD per month, you can listen to hundreds of thousands of full-length songs on demand. If you consider 99 cents per song an impediment to discovery (as I do), this is where to go.
  • Napster
    A name that spelled doom for brick-and-mortar music specialists in the late 90s. Now owned by Best Buy, another name that spelled doom. This is also a music subscription service, an alternative to Rhapsody.
  • eMusic
    A hybrid: they offer songs for sale (to own) via monthly subscriptions which permit a certain number of downloads per month. If you use the maximum allotment, the per-song price runs around 30 cents. Their focus is on independent-label music. I recently subscribed, and the concept beats the heck out of Apple's music store.
  • Pandora
    The best of the internet 'radio' sites. The real fun here is in creating your own radio stations, using favorite songs or artists to seed them. And if you like to genre-hop, add a bunch of divergent favorites into a single custom station and see what pops up. The best site for musical serendipity.
  • MySpace and YouTube
    These well-known sites are excellent if you are trawling for music by lesser-known artists whose works are unavailable on the subscription sites. The high-traffic caveat goes double here. MySpace page loads in particular will have you noticing your own aging process.

 

Related Resources

 

Here are a few other sites that are worthy of mention:

  • Music Giants - These folks offer full WAV-file downloads of popular music. The catalog is admittedly limited, but it is worth a look-see. The files are huge and the download times are lengthy unless your internet access account features speeds faster than vanilla DSL. But this is the one place I know of to download truly CD-quality sound files of name artists.

     

  • GEMM - Still have your turntable hooked up? This is probably the best source of vinyl albums on the web. (As an aside, it's quite something to shop in physical stores selling record albums. The cover art seems positively wide-screen.)

     

  • Newbury Comics - A northeast chain of pop culture retailers, they're one of the few specialists still making a go of it in this nasty environment. They have a pretty good website and decent prices on new CDs. One caveat: their database search engine is rather unforgiving: spell and punctuate your search requests correctly!

     

  • ArkivMusic - A classical music specialist. This operation was co-founded by ex-Tower Records Manhattan classics department operators. They know what they're doing.

     

  • Album Art Exchange - Sort of the MusicGiants of album art. The collection isn't exhaustive, but it's growing all the time, and the scans are beautiful. If you develop an interest in downloading cover art, you'll want to have a look here. It's the gold standard for quality.

     

  • iLounge - All things iTunes and iPod. If you have a question or are looking for tips, check out the forums. The site can be wonky, but it's very informative.

     

  • The Palms Playhouse - If you are local to the Yolo County area, you know all about this renowned music venue which was once housed in a converted barn in south Davis. It's in neighboring Winters now, but the artist lineup is as much fun as ever.