This post discusses tools that can, but are not designed to, aid copyright infringement. Leaving aside potential legal issues, this post is intended to serve an educational purpose and merely describes already available services and software.

A few days back my friend Jake posted an article about the state of downloading music in a post-LimeWire age. Over the years, there have been a few ways that people have gone about getting music from the internet, the most popular being:

• Napster
• Morpheus
• Kazaa
• LimeWire
• BitTorrent
• The iTunes Store [and its ilk]

Jake mentions another alternative – newsgroups. Its a viable option, but most people don’t want to pay a monthly subscription fee for content. Another up and coming site, especially for electronic music is Beatport. Lots of artists are putting their songs up on this site, and the prices aren’t too bad.

A big question now is, where do you find new music? Thanks to the explosion in social networking sites like Facebook and sharing sites like Youtube, there are new methods of finding your music. There are a few websites that allow you to stream audio at any time, but you can’t download it. The bonus is these sites are not like LAUNCHcast or even Last.FM radio – you still get to choose what you listen to.

Some of the best sites for this are:

The Hype Machine: “The Hype Machine tracks a variety of MP3 blogs. If a post contains MP3 links, it adds those links to its database and displays them on the front page.”¹ It also provides links to the iTunes Store and AmazonMP3 to purchase the music. The Hype Machine is unique when compared to the other services listed here because it indexes new music much faster than the others, and if you’re looking for a brand new track, you’re most likely to find it on the Hype Machine.

Imeem: I don ‘t use the service, but it seems like users are allowed to post MP3’s, videos, make playlists, and all other sorts of goodies. This site seems to focus on a lot of the social aspect of sharing.

Skreemr: Like Google for .mp3 files. It scours the web for MP3s and then provides an interface to listen to them, a link to the site that hosts the files, as well as a link to Amazon for the song.

iLike: The most commercial of the listings here, this site looks at your existing tastes and recommends artists to you, much like Last.fm. However, I’ve noticed there seems to be a much higher quantity of full songs on iLike than Last.fm. iLike also focuses a lot on the social aspect of sharing.

The best part about all of these services, in my opinion, is the ability to listen to your music right away. No downloading required [unless you want to, in some cases], you just press play and you’re good. I actually use the Hype Machine more often than I use iTunes now, because there’s no hastle and I can listen to it on any computer, not just on my personal machine.

Have you tried any of these services out? Let me know in the comments.

From http://hypem.com/about¹