Music on the Cheap (or for Free)

Photo by: rodbegbie

Doing a quick poll with my friends, I discovered that a good portion of our monthly expenditure goes to spending money on entertainment. Movies, music, books and magazines, bowling, pool, etc. So I've been looking for ways to reduce entertainment costs without becoming a complete hermit. I'm going to try to do a series of posts on saving money on different types of entertainment starting with this one on music (only because I've got the most info for this one).

Considering the amount of time I spend connected to the internet, it made perfect sense for me to look for sources of music online. At first, I started with purchasing tracks online from the likes of, the now defunct, AllOfMusic.com. Then I decided that I preferred having a regular rotation of songs instead of listening to my purchased tracks over and over again, so I started scouring the internet for streaming radio. The first streaming radio service I used was Spinner radio (now Netscape radio). One thing I've never tried is the subscription service radio so this is definitely something to try out in the near future.

Internet Radio: If you're like me and spend most of your time in front of a computer then this is for you. There are many providers that provide ad-supported streams for free and some that charge a monthly subscription for ad-free listening. Some providers (like Yahoo! Music) provide both options. Listed are some of the sites I frequent for free/cheap music.

> BBC radio

All of BBC's radio stations are streamed live online and through Realplayer. I can't listen to the streams at work because of how my office firewall is configured so don't be too disappointed if you can't access this from your office.

Some of the programmes are archived online can be streamed (READ: streamed not downloaded) for up to 7 days after the programme has been broadcast. Besides the streaming from the archives, BBC radio also provides some of their programmes as podcasts that can be downloaded in mp3 format. However, not all the podcasts are available to users outside of the UK. The fact that these guys are making their content so accessible is really commendable. This is what radio should be: accessible to the masses. I just wish they'd stream their content in a Windows Media Player playable format (this is available only for BBC World Service).

> Yahoo! Music LAUNCHcast

Yahoo! Music website is a whole lot more than an internet radio station with listening options that cost nothing to monthly fees to pay-per-track downloads. They claim to have 2 million songs in their database, so this should cater to most people's music tastes. LAUNCHcast allows you to set up a customized radio station by selecting genres, albums, artists and songs that you like. Content is then streamed according to your preferences through a flash player. Unfortunately, this player does not work on Firefox browsers.

The cool thing about LAUNCHcast radio is that it will also play recommended songs based on your set preferences so this is a great place to discover new music that suites your taste. If, however, you don't like what the site is recommending, just click on the rating stars to never play that track/artist/album ever again. You can also pre-set the player to not play artists that you particularly loath. Of course, if this is a function that you'd only bother to use if you set a high rating for a particular genre and you don't like a particular artist or album that belongs to this genre. Anywho.. just letting you know that this function is available.

So what do you get for free? LAUNCHcast Basic is ad-supported so you will hear advertisements in between songs and see advertisements on the flash player. High-quality streams are also limited to 3000 songs per month. Users are also able to skip tracks before exceeding the 3000 song limit. After exceeding this limit, content is still free but music being streamed is of a lower sound quality and the track skipping function is disabled. By paying a monthly subscription for LAUNCHcast Plus, you get rid of the ads, have unlimited high-quality streams and can skip all the tracks you want. The basic version is good enough for me at the moment since, again, the player doesn't work through my office firewall.

> Christian music stations online

So far I've found 2 that I like but there are many more out there. My reasons for liking these 2 are that their websites are easy to navigate, the streams are consistent (quality-wise) and they have interesting radio personalities. Of course I haven't tried that many over the years (probably about 4 or 5) and I'm sure that there are many other great stations out there but these are the 2 that I listen to most regularly so these are the only 2 that I can give fair comment on.

1. Z-radio

While mainly ad-supported, Z-radio does still rely on donations to keep themselves going. Their tag-line is "Safe for the little ears" which seems to have a slightly secular, non-libertarian slant to it. Probably just trying to reach a broader audience. Anyway, streams are available in both WM and Real playable formats and they have a unique player that shows the song information as it's played. Now, don't get mixed up here. This is normal radio with a DJ that talks about the weather and the traffic, unlike Yahoo! LAUNCHcast's radio that is probably run completely by software pulling tracks out of a database, so this feature is pretty cool. (It doesn't always work so well though.)

Z's music is contemporary Christian, mainly from but not limited to the pop and pop rock genre. Z-radio has also spawned off 2 more genre-specific stations, Y-radio and The Rock. Y-radio plays hip-hop and R&B while The Rock plays, well, rock.

2. K-love

Unlike Z-radio, K-love depends on listener donations to support themselves so there are no adverts in their broadcasts. However, non-donors can only listen to the low-quality stream of the broadcast. If you're not picky about sound quality, then you won't have a problem here. If you do want to donate, however, there are links on the website to do so and once the donation is received (no minimum set) you'll receive a streaming access code that will allow you to receive the high-quality stream of their broadcast. K-love uses a pop-up window with an embedded player (either WM or Realplayer) that requires users to configure with their bandwidth and preferred player. The pop-up window also displays the current song information and this function works better on the K-love player than on Z-radio's. K-love and Z play pretty much the same music so picking a station is pretty much up to your own preferences.

A good source for online radio stations is RealPlayer. Click on the Radio tab in the application and the browser window gives you a list of options for listening to streaming radio. The search function allows user to search by genre and yields some pretty comprehensive search results. Filtering through the results to find a station you like and one with decent quality is another matter, though.

Music on demand: Free music-on-demand sounds like an oxymoron but it does exist legally. That's the good part. The bad part is, content is limited and is streaming only. But beggars can't be choosers so we'll just have to make the best of what's available.

> Deezer

My absolute favourite site of the moment. This France-based website allows users to listen to select tracks, albums and genres to listen to. Users can save playlists and get involved in the Deezer community by "making friends" of other users and joining artist groups. For a free content provider, their selection of music is extensive and quite international. As much as I love this website, I think there is a lot of room for improvement where the user interface is concerned. It took me quite a while to figure out how to work the "smart" radio and the usability could be really improved if multiple tracks could be selected at one time to build playlists(right now you need to select ONE track at a time, then select which playlist to attach it to). It also doesn't help that the help page is only available in French.

Users can also upload their own MP3's into the system to allow them to access their music away from their home PC's. I haven't tried using this function yet, so I have no idea how well it works.

This is also another player that doesn't work through my office firewall, though :( .

> Last.fm

This website has been around for a while, more as an online music community and where people go to discover new music through recommendations by other people who like similar things. Last.fm also has free 30sec previews of music available for free and just recently launched a free music-on-demand service for users in the US, UK and Germany only. So the rest of us will just have to wait until it's made available for us.

Other sources: Although AllOfMusic.com is now defunct, there have been other sites springing up to take it's place for affordable music downloads. If you hate listening to ads and need your music available offline, try subscription services like Rhapsody or Yahoo! Music Unlimited. Some artists also make their music available for download or streaming on their sites so visiting artist site are another good way to look for free music.

Wired has an article here on getting cheap/free music online. Check it out for more tips.