The Music Industry has shifted.  Music is spread for free and in the end the free content that proliferates itself on the Internet generates more merchandise revenue for the bands who produced it.  The consumer wins in the end from this industry shift.  Now anyone can listen to any music, anytime, for free.  Here are five if the best ways to enjoy the best the music industry has to offer.

1. Grooveshark

Grooveshark is a great way to access a huge library of online music and stream it for free. The motto of grooveshark is “find any song in the world, for free.” Grooveshark is great if you just want to stream music, but not so great if you are looking to download. Grooveshark also has a feature that suggests songs for you based on what you listen to. Another cool feature of Grooveshark is the ability to select a single or several songs and easily embed them on a website with a grooveshark widget like the one above.

2. Pandora

Sadly for Canadians, Pandora Internet Radio is available in the US only.

Pandora, like Grooveshark, offers on demand streaming music, and they also generate song suggestions based on what bands you choose. Pandora has commercial free audio, and earns advertising revenue with visual banner ads on the website, where the music player launches from. Pandora is a solid service and is based on the praiseworthy Music Genome Project.

The formation of the Music Genome Project:

On January 6, 2000 a group of musicians and music-loving technologists came together with the idea of creating the most comprehensive analysis of music ever.

3. Limewire

Limewire ended up being the big winner in the fallout of the Metallica/Napster conflict back in the early days of online music sharing.  The latest version of Limewire was just released, Limewire 5.  Limewire 5 is a great tool for downloading almost any mainstream mp3, and fast. I have Limewire on my PC and my Mac and it works flawlessly for grabbing my favorite mp3s on both machines.

4. Kick YouTube

YouTube, as the worlds second largest Search Engine, is still the best place to find most songs.  Any song that lists the embed code can be downloaded for free using a service called Kick YouTube.  Kick YouTube is a simple service for downloading any video on Youtube in a variety of formats, including .mp3.  The only problem with using Kick to download audio from YouTube is the quality is often low. Kick YouTube is very easy to use, as this video explains:

5. Shoutcast Radio

Shoutcast is free Internet Radio Stations. One of the cool things about Shoutcast is that they also offer a cool, free, Shoutcast iPhone app with all the best shoutcast radio streams. I installed this app on my iPhone and it worked flawlessly. The app is very well designed and slick. My favorite Shoutcast station has got to be Groove Salad.

Feedback

What is your favorite way to listen to Music online?