Listen To Music Online With Vastfm
Vastfm provides an interesting free of charge service that allows users to listen music online; Lots of music to be precise. The website uses mashups to provide content as their servers are only hosting a few lines of code that power the site.
What Vastfm is doing is pull the selected artist's discography from open online music directories, and combine the information found with the music of YouTube videos.
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. It contains information about the discography of the selected band or artist. The first song of one of the music albums plays automatically at this time as well.
The results are spot on. Even the tested live albums did return the live songs (most of the time) 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 on 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.
Update: Vastfm's service is no longer available. We have removed the link as a result. Do you know of a comparable service that can take Vast.fm's place? While you can search for songs on YouTube directly, doing so won't get you the additional benefits that the service offered. There is no artist biography on YouTube, and unless someone created a playlist for an album or all albums of an artist, you only get individual songs or music videos but not complete albums.
Update 2: A service that you can check out that is comparable is Jango which offers access to a free music database.
Try to lisen to muziek from Tegan and Sara, Gus black, bombay bicycle club or even Chad Vangaalen. Its pretty clear this is a ferry mainstream (coca cola/Walt Disney) muziek site.
Problem with most of these online music dispatchers is the poor sound quality : under 128kbps don’t expect more than emancipated sound ;)