Listen carefully: here are some new music services
The Internet is the medium par excellence for discovering and playing music. Although most people automatically turn to iTunes for this purpose, original services crop up regularly. We put some new services to the test.
Shuffler
Shuffler (http://www.shuffler.fm) scavenges music blogs and collects the music it finds there in one central spot. The songs are neatly arranged by genre (there are no fewer than 120 categories: indie, mashup, country, 60s, Irish, hiphop, comedy, classical, etc.). When you select a music style, a playlist is opened. The music player is located at the top of the page. Conveniently, the original music blog is shown at the same time. One click posts any song you like on Facebook or Twitter. Switching to a selection of other genres is done via the red arrow.
Wolfgang’s Vault
With the motto “where live music lives” Wolfgang’s Vault (http://www.wolfgangsvault.com) streams performances of your favourite artists to your computer. However, don’t expect any recordings of the latest shows of, for example, Lady Gaga or 50 Cent. So what can you expect to find here? Hundreds of concerts and interviews with artists and bands which dominated the music scene from the 1960s to the turn of the century. Think of AC/DC, Bob Marley, Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones, Miles Davis, U2 and The Who (click on See All for an overview). After a simple registration procedure you can get started. Every concert can be played as a whole, but it’s also possible to compile your own playlist. Indeed, each performance is divided into separate tracks.
Tip. Using this site you can create a combined playlist of live songs performed by a wide variety of artists.
Listening to the recordings - via your computer or via a special iPhone application - is free, but it’s limited to ten hours per month (which is actually quite reasonable). For unlimited listening, you will need to take out a subscription. It costs £34.25/year, but this includes a gift certificate worth £35.50 which you can use to buy posters or T-shirts in the Vault Store. Interestingly, you can also use these credits for buying music files. Indeed, some performances are offered as downloads as well.
Extra features of YouTube
As a user of video-sharing site YouTube you will of course know that you can find video clips of virtually any band or artist here. We already reviewed the YouTube Music Discovery Project (http://www.youtube.com/disco - mind the small letter “d”, otherwise you’ll get to see something else); this service creates playlists of a selection of quality videos on the basis of your favourite artist. This list has options such as AutoPlay and Shuffle (at the bottom right). In the meantime, YouTube has dramatically improved this service: for instance, the full-screen format is now preserved when you switch to the next song in the playlist.
But there’s more: YouTube recently launched a separate Music Channel (http://www.youtube.com/music - again with the small letter “m”). It contains the most popular clips by category, although the number of categories is relatively small at the moment. In each genre you can also have a playlist compiled. This compilation feature is not perfect, but still, this initiative is definitely worth giving a try.
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