I don't own an ipod

I promised everyone that my first post was going to be my longest post, but I still have to get a few more things out of the way. Thanks for all the feedback on the first post, and if you haven’t read it, I suggest you do! Onto post #2...

It is true. I consider myself a music lover, but I don’t have that essential device that allows me to listen to music at my convenience. What is wrong with me? Laziness? When I lived and studied abroad in 2006, I carried around a $20 red cd player I bought from Walmart (gasp: walmart!) – I think the headphones I bought were more expensive. I knew traveling abroad that getting something nice had a good chance of being stolen. Since then have I upgraded? No, and I don't even have the portable cd player! My goal in the near-future is to move whatever music I do have on my old computer to an external hard drive and then maybe move that to another computer. That is a start. My friend jstreet commends me for how I listen to music. It is all from the old noggin – and mostly the internet. I literally listen to all my music through the computer (or being “that guy” that always plays around with your ipod… sorry). I always had the same itunes I had on my computer for a while (never usually updated it), or I had my roommate’s ipod and itunes (we’ll get into our introduction of him later), or senior year I still carried around that red cd player for a while. After graduation, I worked in an office that gave me a laptop and blocked many sites. I couldn’t work without music often, and I couldn’t download anything, so I needed to find music that would stream… for free.

Alas, I digress. Here is how I listen to music:

The Hype Machine – Easily my favorite and go-to site to listen to music. I have to thank jstreet on this one. Simple preface: It basically takes all it’s music from “the blogosphere.” You can see what people are blogging/listening to right on the front page, see what is most popular in the blog world, or simply search for a song/artist and hope it is there. It is how I found most of the new music, and despite the numerous (too many at times) remixes of songs, it is a lovely site and you can also read the links to the blogs.

Pandora – most people know it by now, it is that incredibly smart lovechild from the “music genome project.” From their website: “Just drop the name of one of your favorite songs or artists into Pandora and let the Genome Project go. It will quickly scan its entire world of analyzed music, almost a century of popular recordings - new and old, well known and completely obscure - to find songs with interesting musical similarities to your choice. Then sit back and enjoy as it creates a listening experience full of current and soon-to-be favorite songs for you.” I have created many an awesome station in my first year of work – I tailored probably the best indie female singer station ever. I mostly listened to that station and a hip hop beats station I created (started with J Dilla). I had a good analogy for pandora, but I can't remember it. After a while the pandora plays the same songs, but sometimes gives you something new and it is easy to just let it play as you fall asleep.

Muxtape – Definitely one of the more creative platforms to find and listen to different music, another jstreet find. Yes, it is a compilation of different people’s mixtapes… a true throwback to one of my favorite movies – High Fidelity. For someone who loves making people mixtapes/mixed cds/etc, this was a cool site for music to stream and never understand what you were getting yourself into, but alas, “the man” decided he wanted to keep this beautiful project down, and it is just a platform for bands.

myspace – easy to listen to a few songs of new/famous/bad/your friends’ bands. Yes, I just linked a friend's band.

Last.fm – this combines live music to stream, sometimes not the full song, sometimes music videos, as well as good write ups on the band and tells you about similar artists. You can create a profile and develop your history of listening.

Okayplayer – ok at this point in my life, I don’t listen to too much straight from that website, but it still remains one of the major influences of my evolution of hip hop in high school. It is amazing to see how that site has grown, and how many more artists are part of okayplayer!

Grooveshark – I don’t personally create playlists on this, but I usually check out a friend’s weekly Friday grooveshark play list. At some point, we’ll introduce him and his Friday play lists.

youtube = the easy fix! Too bad you have to sift thru the music videos or weird remixes, but this has everything and this song on this link is hilarious and good all at once. where else could you find it?

Qloud – an offset of youtube, basically takes up all the music videos from youtube. Jstreet worked on this and it still exists, but not so much…

Imeem = When I needed that quick song to have high volume on the computer, and play a random song, I went here because usually it let you stream the song right away. Last year it was bought out by myspace and if you look it up, it basically brings you to iLike! RIP Imeem.com

Anything I'm missing?