Or, you could install the Firefox add-on Find That Band which puts all those options directly at your disposal. All you need to do is to right-click a name, band or artist for instance, and select one of the available search links that point to music related websites.

You get some standard choices like Wikipedia, iTunes or Amazon Mp3, but also several destinations that you may see utilized in an extension like this for the first time. This includes the popular music blog aggregator The Hype Machine, Allmusic, Discogs or iLike.

Just select a destination from the menu and you are set to go. The selected service opens in a new tab in the browser. The searches are pretty dead on all the time. I did about thirty searches during the test and they all returned the right pages on the selected sites.

The mixture is solid, even though some popular options like YouTube or VKontakte are missing from the menu. You can modify the order of items and their appearance in the add-on’s preferences. Here it is possible to hide websites and services so that they do not appear, and move the rest up or down. The results do depend on the text you highlight though. You can use the add-on to discover new artists based on words that you like, which is something new as well I think.

One thing that is not that great is that the music search options are always displayed on top of the right-click context menu if text is selected. This does not make sense all the time, especially if you only highlight a letter or two, or a whole sentence or paragraph. That’s something that needs improvement. You can remove the clutter partially by enabling the folder option in the preferences which puts all visible search options in a folder so that only one entry is displayed on the initial right-click.

Find That Band is nevertheless an interesting add-on for music enthusiasts who often search for band and artist information on the web. What I personally like most is the ability to look up textual information and open websites where you can play songs of the highlighted artist.

FindThatBand can be downloaded from the official Mozilla Firefox add-on repository.

These information are then used to search various video services including Youtube, MyVideo, Vimeo or Discogs. The information are then displayed in the main interface that resembles a desktop music player. Results are shown in a song and album list. It is therefor possible to check out a specific album of an artist or band using Semsix.

Semsix displayed quality levels for each song that is listed in the interface. Green dots indicate a good quality while gray dots indicate songs that have not been found by the search engine. A click on an album at the top will only show the songs of that album in the results list. Songs can be added to a playlist which can be saved for later use. All songs that have been found can be played right away on the site. A video of the song will be shown during playback as well.

A site logo on top will indicate the source of the song. Other possibilities offered by Semsix are switching to simple view which will display all songs that have been found in a list, a build in lyrics search engine and web radio capabilities.

All these features make Semsix an interesting option for users who want to listen to songs from specific artists or albums online. No registration is required to use the service.

The result is pretty amazing. The complete discography of many artists are shown on the results page. All albums and songs can be played right on the website without additional plugins or registration hassles.

Users who want to listen to music online can enter a band or artist name in the search form or pick one of the suggestions in the tag cloud below. It takes only a few seconds before the next page is loaded containing information about the discography of the selected band or artist. The first song of one of the music albums will play automatically.

The results are spot on. Even the tested live albums did return the live songs (most of the times) and not other studio versions of the songs. All songs were playing fine during tests, there was no delay or any other sort of disturbance. The page with the music player uses several ads which might be distracting to some users. It provides the means to purchase songs at Amazon. There are also some concert information listed on some pages.

Vastfm is a unique interesting website that provides access to virtually any band and song that can be found on Youtube.

Data flatrates and mobile broadband will make it possible to access the very same songs on any mobile device everywhere in the world. Who needs songs on their devices if the very same songs can be accessed all the time on the Internet? The following article contains websites that can be used to listen to music online. It will concentrate on so called music search engines which are becoming increasingly popular. There are however many other possibilities to listen to music online like Internet Radio (Shoutcast is a good start), video portals (Youtube has probably the largest collection of music available on the Internet in form of music videos) or community sites like Last.fm.

All music search engines in the list are freely accessible by any user without registration. It should also be noted that only those music search engines are listed that provide access to the full song so that it can be listened to online. Lastly only search engines allow access for users from all around the world are included in the list.

Listen To Music Online

Deezer

Deezer looks more like a music portal than a search engine. It is more a music community with search engine than the other way round. Visitors can listen to music and create playlists without logging into the website.The site focuses strongly on French music but the search finds many popular musicians and songs as well.

Grooveshark

Online music search engine that makes use of a large music database and provides playlist support.

iLike

A very extensive music search engine with playlist support. Provides access to pre-generated playlists.

Imeem

Another music community website that provides access to a large database of music. Offers custom playlists and music discovery.

Last.fm

Last.fm is one of the most popular music communities on the Internet. It provides extensive information about artists including online radio capabilities.

MP3 Realm

MP3 Realm offers an index of more than 6 million mp3s. It provides access to both music and lyrics in its database. Music can be listened to online or downloaded to the local computer.

Playlist

A community to share playlists online. Offers a music search engine with the opportunity to create playlists one the fly and listen to them.

Seeqpod

Seeqpod constantly crawls the Internet for new music and music videos which it displays then in its interface. Music can be added to a playlist which can be saved to access it at a later time again.

Skreemr

Skreemr looks pretty much like the Google search engine from the outside. It utilizes its own media player and provides additional information about the music by listing album information and links to sites like Youtube or Wikipedia.

The Hype Machine

Online music search engine that combines playback capabilities with additional information like tour dates and music reviews.

Everything – that means the search, results and playback – happens on the same page which is excellent for finding some music very quickly. One could argue that it is also possible to go directly to Youtube but there are some differences. One is that StreamDrag provides access to a very intuitive playlist that can be used to play multiple songs in a row without leaving the page.

Results are displayed almost instantly and of great quality. Songs can be played right there or added to the playlist to play multiple songs in a row. It is furthermore possible to loop songs or the playlist. The only other control on the page is the volume bar which can be used to change the volume of the songs.

Tests have been very good for most bands, songs and albums that have been entered in the search form. Results are basically the same that can be found on Youtube.

The categories are Songs, Artists, Albums, Playlista and Genres. If you enter an artist for instance you will find songs of that artist in the songs category and the albums in albums obviously. If you pick the albums category you can play all songs of a album which is a nice feature.

The music plays perfectly even if you switch tabs or minimize the browser. Registered users can create playlists of their favorite songs and Grooveshark Lite is recommending similar songs if any have been found.

Grooveshark Lite offers a great design and usability with a huge music database that does find many artists and songs. Naturally not all artists and songs can be found but if you are looking for popular artists, charts stuff and even popular artists in a certain genre you will find them at Grooveshark Lite.

The website is connected to Grooveshark, could be some kind of teaser website to make Grooveshark more popular. If that is the case they will definitely succeed.

Artists get paid whenever a song is played by using revenue sharing, which means that they will be paid by a percentage of the advertising revenue based on the number of plays. Contracts with all four major labels made this improvement possible which could be a great step in the right direction.

A quick check revealed that the implementation has not been finalized yet but that you can access a lot of full length tracks already. Give it a day or two and everything will sort out. Users are a little bit confused for instance about existing playlists and embedded content.

I’m not a regular Last.fm user though and it would be nice if regular users could voice their opinion on the change.

All you can do on the clone websites is to enter an artist name or song name and search for it. You get search results that show found songs and you can play or download those songs. If you choose to play a song it is loaded in a new window with a very basic player.

Seeqpod on the other side offers a playlist of songs that you have selected, repeat, shuffle, skip songs, change the volume, share playlists with friends, a video search and a discovery mode. We will most likely see more of these websites pop up in the near future and they surely will get coverage on some websites.

If you click on the icon before the song title you add it to your playlist which can be saved, shared and embedded. Instead of trying out random finds you can also perform a search for an artist, band name or title and add those found to your playlist as well.

This means that is is relatively easy to build a large playlist with songs that you like and listen to them while online. The link to the song is displayed as well but not clickable by default.

There is however the possibility to use a program like Grab++ to grab the link and send it to a download manager such as Orbit downloader to download the song. I tested this method and it works perfectly.

A search for Linkin Park revealed more than 2300 entries. Each search results page contains ten links to mp3′s with information about the absolute link to the mp3, a description, name and details as well as a basic music player that connects and plays the mp3.

The file size is the most important information next to the song name of course because it can be used as an indicator of the quality of the song.

Hovering your mouse over the song url reveals even more information such as the bitrate, the cover art and the last time the url had been crawled.

Skreemr supports some advanced search parameters. They can be used to search for an exact phrase (“My favorite Band”), to emphasize words (“My favorite Band +live +London”) and to exclude words from the search (“My favorite band -live”).

This is a great service that is surely going to face some heat from the Music Industry. Skreemr offers a great way for users to find new mp3 files and download them to their computer

Audiobaba is a new service that I have not heard of before. You begin be entering either a song title, album or artist in the search field. This is normally a artist that you know and like. All results that match the keywords that you have entered are then shown on the next page. You can then listen to samples from all songs that have been found. The samples are usually between 20 seconds and 1 minute.

Once you have found the song that you have been looking for you can click on the “match” button which searches the database of songs again for matches, that is songs and artists that sound similar to the selection that you have made. One of my favorite songs of all time is Vincent by Don McLean and Audiobaba gave me more than 40 matches of songs. Some of them did fit very well with the overall theme of the song Vincent and some did not.

It is however very easy to distinguish between those songs, just listen to them and give them a thumbs down if you think they do not match or bookmark them for alter reference. Bookmarking them means that they are added to a personal page at Audiobaba. You might be wondering how they find out if two songs are similar to each other, here is their answer:

Audiobaba is powered by a complex artificial intelligence and years of academic research on sound and music. Our computer algorithms ‘listen’ to music and compare it for multitudes (we can’t tell you the exact number but its over 70) of acoustic qualities like beats, rhythm, and all that jazz.

It would be more than interesting to get more opinions on the success rate of that algorithm. If you did use the service, did the recommended songs match the one that you entered ?