For those of you still hoping for the return of Napster and the days of free musing on the Internet, well there’s no need to get crazy. I’ve found two really cool sites, Playlist.com and Boomshuffle.com, where you can get the free music you crave, yes I said free and completely legal.
Playlist.com uses a search engine to search the net for music files. These music files are then compiled into a playlist and streamed to you from those websites or through Playlist.com own cache. According to Playlist.com, the music that is streamed to you is collected through places like promotional websites or where the web sites “meet reasonable criteria for having the legal right to post the music files appearing on their web pages”. You can create music playlists by searching for your favorite songs or artists using their search bar. You can alter the look of the player, including color and then embed the html code onto many popular sites, such as myspace, facebook, blogger etc.
The concept of Boomshuffle.com is slightly different than that of Playlist.com. Boomshuffle uses an Internet radio concept to work around the legal issues, much like streaming radio site www.shoutcast.com does, except that you can listen to the music you want and not be at the mercy of the radio channels own playlist. This Internet radio status means that there is little less flexibility on the number of times you can listen to or skip over music in the playlist, but this is easily overcome by creating numerous playlists so that you can switch over to a different playlist whenever you like.
Both these sites offer people what they crave, free non-commercialized music listening. Sites like these will truly restructure the way we think and interact with music, and best of all, it makes music available to everyone, creating a global community of music connoisseurs. So there you have it, free music on the Internet.
Playlist.com is a neat site – if only I could transfer some songs to my mp3 player vfor free.