Music to my ears

I enjoy listening to music and the web has been a huge help with filling my ears with the music I already like as well as a constant flow of new music.

Like many of you I started with iTunes and still use iTunes with my iPod today, but Apple's model is a bit locked down for me and I have been exploring other services, many of which integrate with iTunes.

At this point I have tired and rejected Rhapsody, which started out nicely, but their upgrades have made the product so unreliable that I gave up on them. They also lock you down to select MP3 players none of which work as well as the iPod.

I am a big fan of Pandora and use it on the web as well as on my Blackberry (and via my Blue-Ray DVD player) and it works for my casual listening times where I want to hear a certain type of music or don't want to bother picking what music I want to listen to letting Pandora take care of it for me.

Recently I have been using Lala, which is a mix between all of the other services as companies continue to try and find the right combination of services and pricing. In the case of Lala you can listen to any song they have in its entirety once for free. This feature allows you to determine if you really want to hear it again or if hearing it once satisfy the need for that song. If you decide to purchase it you can do so as a web purchase or as a MP3 purchase. A web purchase means you can listen as often as you want to the song via Lala's web portal for just $.10 a track. A MP3 purchase is DRM free meaning you can listen to it anyone including iTunes. Lala even provides nice integration with iTunes meaning that songs you download via Lala are automatically added to your iTunes library (if you want).

Finally, a nice feature of Lala is that you can upload songs you already have (at least the ones that are not DRM protected) which gives you the ability to listen to them on Lala as web songs providing nice portability to your music collection.

I have not found a way to integrate listening to Lala outside of the web client yet, but hopefully a Blackberry client is in their plans.

While this is a never ending journey, I have summarized my findings so far in yet another Google Docs spreadsheet. As I update the spreadsheet this blog entry will also update, so check back often.

As always I look forward to your thoughts and comments on the music services you like or want to learn more about via Technology Plumbing.