I was only told about this website recently: www.last.fm
Type in the name of a band or artist and it will give you a page with links to their albums and singles, a bit of a bigraphy - and much more.
Say you choose “Motörhead”, it will give you a page of stuff about Motorhead, and there is a button marked “Play Motörhead Radio”. Click that and the website will continuously stream randomly selected tunes not only from Motörhead, but from other bands that are broadly similar.
Enter “Little Walter” and you get a page of stuff about this legendary blues harmonica player. Press “Play Little Walter Radio” and it will continuously stream blues by people like Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters and so on.
It seems to have more or less everything on it. I typed in Johnny Collins (big in the UK traditional English folk scene, which is very much a niche market!) and they had him in there. Then I tried Rudimentary Peni (minority interest anarcho punk band) and that worked too.
Other successes included Dave Brubeck, Frankie Lymon, George Formby… this really is a website for all musical tastes.
The great thing is it gives you a chance to listen free to stuff - to try before you buy. If you pay a small subscription fee, there are other facilities to make play lists and so on.
I don’t understand how all this music is “out there” somewhere for free. MySpace has a ton of music that you can access for free. Now this site. Why do I pay for a Rhapsody subscription when I can get it all for free? What a great time to be alive. The world is getting really cool.
P.S. - It just finished playing Rush’s “Fly By Night” and then it stopped before moving on to “The Trees”. I had to go back to the web page and press “play” again to hear the next song. I guess that’s so you keep looking at the advertisements. Fair enough.
Why would you want something else? Quality.
The music available by the streaming sites is of lower audio quality. You’re lucky if you get 128 kbps mp3. Most of the time you get much worse. 64 kbps and lower streaming music drives me crazy. It’s annoying to the ears. I’d rather listen to nothing than sit through more than 5 minutes of low bitrate music.
The pay services like Rhapsody have higher bitrates (usually). There are very few subscription service options for people (like me) who want to listen to high quality music.
Last.fm is a great resource for exploring new music. The recommendations for similar artists is fantastic. Good basic bios and info on each band as well.
Another similar service is Pandora. They also do similar artists recommendations and have bios on the bands. But Last.fm seems to do it better.
Another service that I like for researching bands and songs and performers is AllMusic.com. They have great reviews and bios. What they lack is a similar artists type feature. But the quality reviews and bios make up for it.