Lets take a closer look at how this works. The extension, available for the Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome web browser picks up mp3 files automatically that you happen to stumble upon on the Internet. This is automatic, and a player is displayed at the bottom of the browser window to play those songs directly on the page. Registered users get the additional benefit that discovered music is saved so that they can open it at anytime on the Ex.FM website.

The service works well with popular music sites such as Bandcamp, Soundcloud, the Live Music Archive or music blogs hosted on Tumblr. Songs are picked up automatically even if you do not play the songs on the site. They are then sorted automatically by site > artist and album on the Exfm website.

You can click on the extension icon to bring up the current music queue that offers all the options you would expect from a music player (back, forward, pause, stop volume).

If you do not want to look for music by yourself, you can use the trending and explore options on the site to get your daily music fix.

Trending displays the top 20 tracks of the last 24 hours on Ex.FM.

The explore section on the site offers several options:

• Site of the day – A new site every day that posts publicly accessible mp3 music.
• Genres – Pick a genre and get a selection of music that other users have found.
• Featured Album – A favorite editor picked album of the day.
• Tastemakers – Music discovered by popular Ex.FM members is posted here.
• Monthly Mixtape – A hand picked mixtape that changes monthly.
• Latest loved – Realtime music discovery, again from other users of the site.

The extensions are not needed to use the service. You can visit the service to access both the trending and explore sections of the site.

If you like to discover new music, or are simply looking for a versatile web music player that picks up songs that you find on web pages automatically, then you should take a closer look at Exfm. And since it is all about direct mp3 links, you won’t encounter country restrictions like you would with other services or players. Thumbs up!

Shuffler.fm is offering a service that turns music posted on music blogs into Internet radio. The concept is pretty simple. Different genres are listed on the start page, from the usual candidates like rap, rock or indie to niches like folk, irish or experimental.

shuffler

A click on a genre switches the view. The new page shows a header bar that offers genre selection and song controls. The first song starts playing automatically and Shuffler will play music non-stop until the user closes the window, presses the pause button or switches the music genre.

shuffler.fm

The rest of the page displays the page of the music blog the song was taken from. It is possible to interact normally on that page, which includes leaving comments or downloading songs directly from the pages.

Shuffler can only be used in the browser, which somewhat limits the service. Still, it is possible to keep the page open in the background and listen to the music all day long.

NoScript or NotScript users will run into some troubles with the service, since Shuffler is using scripts to embed the music blogs, which means that the blogs are blocked automatically by the script.

Users who want to try out Shuffler can visit the homepage to do so. It is an interesting music discovery service that only requires a browser. (via Download Squad)

The official reasoning behind that change is that Last.fm users have for some time now used other music services as well to listen to music and that it would be in the best interest of all parties involved if Last.fm would concentrate on their core mission and leave the music streaming to those music providers instead.

The changes are already shown on the sites. Single music tracks like the one shown above now display a preview this track link (to listen to 30 seconds of the track) and links to partner sites which vary heavily depending on the user’s location in the world.

The beta launch partners are Spotify, MOG and The Hype Machine with more – including Vevo and We7, in the pipeline.

Last.fm will concentrate their efforts on music strategy including statistics, scrobbling and their music recommendatino engine as well as community features offered on their websites.

The move itself can be seen as a positive one for users who are not living in the countries that were able to access the on-demand streaming feature. These users actually benefit from the change as they can now access those third party music streaming services, some of which are available for a worldwide audience, directly from within Last.fm.

Users from the US, UK and Germany on the other hand lose the ability to play full-length music tracks directly on the Last.fm website but the partner services ensure that they can still listen to full-length tracks on those partner sites.

We are concentrating the discovery in this report on music, more specifically music from artists that the majority of users has never heard about.

Muzic scans the Internet and in particular blogs for free music that is then listed on their website. The majority of music that is found this way has been produced by new bands but the occasional promo of established bands (Black Sabbath or Queens of the Stone age for instance) appears in the results as well.

This alone would be useful to discover music blogs that post information about artists and mp3 samples of their work.

The artists and songs that are listed on the homepage of the service do reveal little information. The blog posts usually state the artist name, name of the free song and the genre.

Most of the links lead to the blog the music was posted on. It is there that you find a download link pointing to one or multiple mp3s of the artist(s) that have been reviewed there. These blog posts usually contain a review of the song or artist.

But Muzic does not only display what is posted at other blogs on their own page. More important than that is probably the search and categorization of music and artists.

It is for instance possible to display popular tags, songs by genre or data. The advanced search on the other hand can be used to search for specific songs, artists, blogs or in all information at once.

The results on the other hand look like the homepage listings. But that is more than sufficient and adds to the excitement of discovery. It is probably a good idea to look at specific genres to find music that you are interested in.

All mp3 songs can be downloaded to the local computer system, this can accumulate to more than one hundred Megabytes of music per day if the blog links are followed as well.

Muzic offers a great and comfortable way of discovering new music that is being uploaded and reviewed on the Internet. An RSS feed is available to subscribe to the site and be informed about new discoveries more easily.

The first playlist mixes the original artist with related artists while the second displays only related artists and their songs.

Songs from all three playlists can be mixed together and viewed on the same page.

Youtube Disco can obviously be used to either play only songs from one artist or songs from that artist and related artists. The latter seems to be the main use of the service as the other option is also possible directly on Youtube.

The music videos that are selected in the playlists are not necessarily high quality videos as they can also contain live or fan made videos.

The music discovery service is without doubt one of the core features of Youtube Disco. It is easy to use and seems to yield good results most of the time.

Youtube Disco is an official Youtube service

Enter Cloud Speakers, a music business news aggregation site that offers more than a slightly unusual layout and choice of color. Cloud Speakers displays music business news on their pages. It has a vast database of artists and labels which can be followed on page, by email or RSS news feed.

They collect news, reviews, audio and video and make it available on their website. The user can filter the four main categories, if he is only interested in reviews he can only display those. The audio category is a very appealing category on the website. Users can play the music that is listed in that category. The frontpage of Cloud Speakers is offering an mp3 player that is showing and playing the latest mp3 as well. (A similar feature is available on individual artists pages)

A source is provided next to each news item to read the complete news article or review on the original website. Although there are a few reasons why using Cloud Speakers might be a good idea there are some that stick out. The first is that it is possible to follow artists by RSS news feed or email update. That’s indeed a nice feature if you are a hot blooded fan and crave for news on your favorite artists.

The second is music discovery. It is possible to play music on the website which might give a user the opportunity to find new artists that he likes.

It is interesting to note that Cloud Speakers is missing many of the social news portals features like commenting on news, rating music or making friends. That’s a refreshing change for some users while others will probably miss those features dearly.

Well the service got updated a while ago and is now displaying the top songs of every year from 1901 onwards to 2008. Each year holds hundreds of songs that can be played fully on the website. Talk about an awesome way to discover new music or listen to old classics that you grew up with.

Besides that they have added the Top 100 iTunes songs and the Top 100 iTunes Rap / Hip Hop songs to their website.

I personally do not use Pandora or Last.fm but still find Favtape pretty useful for the mentioned reason.

I first tried accessing directly which redirected me to a restricted website explaining why I was not allowed to listen to Pandora from my location outside the United States. So, the ban of everyone from outside the United States is still in place at Pandora.

My second try was with the excellent Secure Tunnel solution which I use for some time now that allowed me to watch Hulu and download from NBC Direct as well. I activated Secure Tunnel in Opera and Pandora would load and play fine as if I was a user from the United States.

As you can see the first screenshot is displaying the apology that they can’t serve me at Pandora while the second screen is showing a working Pandora interface with Secure Tunnel (aff, not free).

A user commented a while back in the Hulu article that I wrote that it was able to access Pandora with web proxies as well as long as they would be based in the United States. I tried that with several of them and I did not see the restricted website but when Pandora was starting to load it displayed that they were having technical difficulties at the moment which was not true because I was listening to Pandora just fine in Opera.

Please let me know if you have found a proxy that is working with Pandora so that I can confirm this method and search for some proxies to add to this article.

The source code does not reveal lots of information about the location of the song which means I once again have to fire up Grab++ to grab the real url of the song and download it. All big music portals use randomized songs these days which are generated when a user requests the song. They are available for a short period of time only which means that time is essential.

Download Orbit Downloader if you have not done so already and start Grab++ from the Tools menu. Grab++ sits there analyzing the Internet connection waiting for multimedia links. All links to multimedia files are listed in Grab++ and can be send to the Orbit Download manager to be downloaded directly to your computer. Grab++ has to be started before you load the Imeem page that contains the music that you want to download.

The download should be started immediately after discovering the link in Grab++ to avoid a timeout. If you get a timeout and the download does not finish delete it and try again.

Imeem uses ridiculously large filenames with the flv (flash video) extension. Make sure you rename the downloaded music from Imeem to be able to recognize it later on.

You might want to convert the flv file to mp3 afterwards. A great software that does this is the Freez Flv to Mp3 Converter

Instead of displaying the videos they only play the music of the videos getting effectively rid of the video part. The music is still transferred as flv files and I suppose they just found a way to reduce the video player to zero on their website. The concept is great however and navigation feels much faster this way.

The website is making good use of Ajax and songs can be added to playlists, shared with friends, watched at Youtube and rated. The only real problem that I see is that there is no information on the length of the songs. We all know that some guys upload 20 second clips taken with their mobile phones.

It would be really nice if the duration of each song would be displayed there as well.

The Music Map is a world map that displays the top ten charts of many countries. You can start by clicking on a country on the world map or by selecting a continent first. Some countries are further divided into their states and you can only get information for those states.

Once you click on a country or state the top 10 artists and top 10 albums are displayed. When you click on one of the items displayed it will show a detailed view.

It would be nice if there would be a way to listen to the music displayed in those lists or see a Youtube / Last.fm mashup that would stream those songs. This is not done yet which means that you have to manually search for the artist or album on those sites to get an impression.

Update: The Music Map service has been discontinued. Here are a few alternatives: YouTube, the popular video hosting website, has a music directory which displays the top 100 songs of a day. Just tune in to watch and listen to those music videos on the site. Please note that some music videos may be blocked in your country.

Other alternatives are the popular music information site Last.fm or the free music repository Jamendo.

Just browse the sites a bit to find the charts section. It is usually highlighted prominently on the start page of the service website.

Midomi offers two ways to find the name of a song or artist who performed the song. The first method requires a microphone while the second requires textual information about the song.

If you got a microphone you could sing or hum part of the song that you remember and Midomi tries to find information about that song in their database. This works pretty solid even if you are not a professional singer.

The second method requires that you can remember fragments of the lyrics of the song. Just enter the text that you can remember into the search box on the main page of Midomi and wait until the search found possible matches which are displayed on the next page which loads automatically.

You can play the songs that have been found to find the one that you are looking for if it is also in their database. Midomi offers a great way to find songs that you crave to know more details about. I really don’t like it if I hum a song all day because I heard it on radio not knowing which artist sang the song.