Free Music.

There’s little reason to pay for digital music these days, especially if the artist you're seeking is signed to a major label. By all means buy it if you can, but the artists don’t get much money from digital sales. Support them by buying concert tickets or better yet, find them and put money directly into their hands (or PayPal accounts) to show them you care about their art. If you’re too poor to financially support the artists you love, do not fear. Music is your inalienable right as a human being. Feel free to stream, and sometimes even download, music for free. All five of these methods are tested by your expert Music Advisor and completely 100% legal.

Spotify — The app has recently become completely free on all (Android, iOS, computers, etc) devices. There are only two known downsides to Spotify: You’ll have to listen to some ads every few songs and if you’re on a smartphone as opposed to a smart tablet or a smart computer, you’ll be limited to a shuffle of album, artist or playlist. Spotify has approximately (MixtressRae’s verrry scientific evaluation of guessing) 80% of everything, has excellent sound quality, lots of ways to discover new music, and did I mention FREEEE?

Freegal — Anyone living in the states of Missouri or Kansas can get a Kansas City library card at kclibrary.org. They’ll mail it to you. With your library card information, you can log into freegalmusic.com and download (to keep, FOREVER) 5 songs a week. You can also stream for unlimited time-stuffs from their site or app, though the interface for both is a bit clunky.

Groove + — this smartphone app just came out a couple of weeks ago. It’s basically an interface with YouTube that allows you to stream any of YouTube's music content for free with only small banner ads. The app automatically plays the videos associated with the track, but if you lock your phone, you’ll be able to listen to the audio only, which is something you can’t do through the traditional YouTube app. This is a free way to gain mobile access to almost ANY song, because YouTube has EVERYTHING. Only available on iOS, so far. 

speaking of YouTube — You really can find almost anything on YouTube. You can create playlists too. Even from a non-iOS mobile device there are wayyyyys to listen to music through YouTube on the go. Google it…or email me and I’ll Google it for you.

NPR — Through the app or npr.org, one can access lots of free music. NPR regularly features the streaming of entire albums (a feature called “first listen”). If you poke around in the music areas of their site, they sometimes have playlists with tracks that can be downloaded to keep in your music library.

With these five methods, you should be able to find anything you want to listen to with only an internet connection and a dream. You’re welcome.

Mixtressrae@yahoo.com

Battle of the RADIO stars.

You may have heard that there is yet another “Pandora-killer” on the market: iTunes Radio. It works the same way all the internet radio services work. It plays a station based upon an artist/song/genre of your choice and you can “star” it or reject it. We all know the drill of user-input internet radio. 

I decided to compare 4 of these radio services in a highly scientific (I made a chart and everything!) analysis. I gave each service a point for each of 8 set parameters they excel within. With each service I listened to a station based on Grimes’ “Circumambient” for an hour counting songs listened and songs liked, then converted the ratio to a percentage. If the percentage of songs liked was at least 75%, the service gets a point. Math! Who will win the battle of radio??

Spotify Radio --

Availability/Convenience: Available on computers, Apple and Android apps. (+1)

Price: free with ads or $10/mo (+1)

Library Size: 20 million songs (+1)

Ability to Customize Stations: Once a station has been started, only customization is “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” within tracks.

Streaming Quality: 320 kbps (+1)

User Interface: Pretty if a bit of a learning curve. There are a lot of apps/features within the computer program that make it easy to discover new music. (+1)

Standout Features: When you “like” a song, Spotify automatically adds it to a “Liked from Radio” playlist. This playlist isn’t playable on mobile devices if you’re a free user, however.

Listening enjoyment: 65%

Overall Score: 5/8

Pandora --

Availability/Convenience: Available Everywhere. (+1) 

Price: free with ads or $36/year (+1)

Library Size: 1 million songs

Ability to Customize Stations: You can rename stations and add multiple artists and songs. (+1)

Streaming Quality: free users are stuck at 128kbps and paid subscribers can only get up to 192kbps. 

User Interface: UI is fine online but the mobile app’s ads take up a lot of space and are incredibly annoying if you’re a free user. The album artwork is typically low quality and often altogether missing.

Standout Features: Pandora started it, but they are way behind and need to retool their approach now that everyone else is in the radio business.

Listening enjoyment: 92% (+1) Though this percentage is high, the selection was boring overall.

Overall Score: 4/8

iTunes Radio -- 

Availability/Convenience: The service is conveniently integrated into the iTunes app on computers and iDevices, but it’s not available on Android devices. 

Price: free with ads or $25/year (+1)

Library Size: 27 million songs (+1)

Ability to Customize Stations: You can rename stations and add multiple artists, songs, and genres. There’s also an option to tune your station to “hits, discovery, or mix” which is pretty cool. (+1)

Streaming Quality: Apple hasn’t revealed their kilobits per second, but it sounds decent. Purchased tracks from iTunes are 256kbps, so that’s likely their streaming bitrate as well. (+1)

User Interface: UI is user-friendly and pretty, as is Apple’s wont. I also really enjoy the simplicity of the service being integrated into iTunes apps. (+1)

Standout Features: That ability to tune your stations is pretty sweet. You can also add songs to a wishlist and/or buy them directly from iTunes. (+1)

Listening enjoyment: 79% (+1)

Overall Score: 7/8

Google Music Radio --

Availability/Convenience: Available on computer, Android and there are workaround apps for Apple, but no Google Music app proper as of yet. (+.5) 

Price: $10/mo to access the radio feature and Google Music All Access, their on-demand music service.

Library Size: 20 million (+1)

Ability to Customize Stations: You can rename stations only.

Streaming Quality: 320 kbps. (+1)

User Interface: UI is great on Android and computer, but the workaround apps for Apple are clunky and don’t always work. (+.5)

Standout Features: Because Google’s radio service is only available with their subscription service, you have the ability to add songs to your library, skip, replay, and see your future queue. (+1)

Listening enjoyment: 65%

Overall Score: 4/8

WINNER -- iTunes Radio.

FINAL THOUGHTS -- iTunes Radio wins for me because it’s convenient, customizable, and I have several Apple products. It was incredibly liberating to FINALLY give up on Pandora. Their bad bitrates and annoying ads led me to close Pandora’s box, maybe forever. If you’re an Android user who is similarly vexed with Pandora, Spotify Radio is an excellent free alternative. Which radio service to use is highly subjective, so pick your favorite and email me your thoughts at mixtressrae@yahoo.com

places your entire music library could live.

In a post-apocalyptic Joplin, I am of the personal opinion that one cannot have too many places to store their music collection within.  Perhaps I’m a little OVERprepared for disaster in this aspect, but if there’s one thing that I cannot possibly live without, it’s my music, so here are places where mine lives (5 in total, yes, I’m deranged), and perhaps one or two of these options will be useful for a normal human being as well:

1. COMPUTER-- At the very least, get all of your music ripped onto the hard drive of your computer.  Rip at higher bitrates for better audio quality (check the “preferences” or “settings” or “options” in your computer’s ripping software to tweak this.  I use 320kbps for all my ripping.).  You’ll need a disc drive to upload CDs, a tape deck, some cords, and some compatible software like Audacity to convert cassettes, and likewise a record player, Audacity, and more cords to convert records, though this process is a pain (here’s a good article on how to do this: http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-20076685-285/the-cheap-way-to-convert-lps-audio-cassettes-to-digital/) so only do for things you absolutely can’t get digitally or through CD.  If you need to recover music you lost in the Wretched 2011 Wind, search our illustrious library’s catalog at joplinpubliclibrary.org for CDs you can check out--you can take home 4 at a time and we have a pretty decent selection (Seriously, this one time I got to help pick out a bunch of stuff...that was AWESOME!).
2. EXTERNAL BACKUP DRIVE-- Once you have all your music stored digitally, this and the following 3 music storage options are available to you.  Having an external hard drive is a good idea to backup your computer in general anyway (I back-up my entire computer every 10 days), and these puppies can be had for less than a hundred bucks at RadioShack and BestBuy (Seagate is well-reviewed and has served me well--survived the year 2011, even!).  If you can, lock your backup-drive away in a weather-proof enclosure for extra paranoid protection.
3. iPOD CLASSIC or OTHER LARGE CAPACITY MP3 PLAYER-- This option is probably only for the really big music geeks, because this little dream-machine (the iPod classic) costs 250$ for 160GB of storage.  I have all my music, movies, and pictures on my Classic.  I always get a little geek-thrill stomping out of the house with only my iPod the size of a cassette tape shuffling my entire music collection.  Every music-dweeb should have this distinct post-millennium pleasure.
4. iTUNES MATCH or OTHER CLOUD MUSIC SERVICE: In the event that all of your earthly possessions are obliterated (the iPod, the backup drive, AND the computer) which is, unfortunately, no longer something far-fetched for a lot of us, you’ll need to also have your music backed up in the cloud, which is another way of saying uploaded to the internet.  There are several services that do this: I personally use both Google Music (play.google.com) and iTunes Match, but there’s also Grooveshark, Amazon, and many other services as well.  They all involve time to upload and can suck the life out of your internet connection (in the case of me uploading my 9,000 songs to Google, it took about three weeks, but it won’t be that time-consuming if you have less music or a better internet connection), but wayyy worth it if your music is the second thing you grabbed last May (I know your animals come first--or children, if you’re into that sort of thing.) before climbing out of the rubble.  Check out the following article for a detailed analysis on all the cloud music storage options out there (http://lifehacker.com/5812138/cloud-music-comparison-whats-the-best-service-for-streaming-your-library-everywhere).

Remember, you don’t have to be as paranoid as me, but if you choose only two of these options, your music will feel snug and safe pending any season’s weather apocalypses.  If you need tech support carrying out any of these options, email me at mixtressrae@yahoo.com and I’ll try my best to answer your questions.