Essential Web Based Resources in Music

Also check out our Music Cube featuring playlists from the BBC.

Brainwashed
Brainwashed exists as a website for information on a small number of bands and record companies. Brainwashed is owned by one person, Jon Whitney and is operated by a wonderful staff of volunteers all over the world who love the music.

Antifolk
Antifolk delivers music with attitude, the stuff your mother warned you about and the neocons spend millions of PAC dollars on eradicating. In other words, a great site to discover cutting edge music.

cherrypeel
cherrypeel says "In our opinion, major labels, radio stations, and TV channels have been the only ones with the power to decide the artists and genres that get heard. We are trying to give the power back to the fans. Our goal is to help music lovers find new and exciting music easily and conveniently without the intervention of corporations. Our voting system ensures songs chosen by you will rise to the top of our chart. Artists will generate free publicity and hopefully a strong fan base as they rise to number one. Songs are ranked on votes over time, so the music on the ‘popular’ chart will constantly be changing. Cherrypeel helps making unknown artists, known."

Encyclopedia Metallum
Encyclopedia Metallum is a user generated, searchable database of Metal Bands, worldwide. More than 22,000 bands listed.

Fat Campus Music Download Page
We compiled a collection of internet websites to find and download MP3's that are legal and free. Much of the free downloads are from up and coming bands and artists looking for an audience.

Fabchannel
Fabchannel.com brings you a wide variety of live music in sound and vision. From upcoming acts to big stars playing rock, hiphop, folk, avant-garde and everything in between. With a team of dedicated, music loving directors, editors, programmers and promoters Fabchannel has built one of the biggest online concert archives in the world. 400 full-length concerts, festivals, performances, debates and lectures can be freely experienced in the Fabchannel video on demand archive. Live from the famous Paradiso and Melkweg Amsterdam.

FolkWeb
FolkWeb is dedicated to the new, independent, and undiscovered folk and acoustic artists.

The Hype Machine
The Hype Machine tracks songs and discussion posted on the best music blogs.

The Internet Underground Music Archive
Iuma.com, is a website started by unknown artists looking to find an audience. Using the site is easy. Go to the home page, find a genre of music you like, and start listening to new music. You can sample it in Real Audio and then pull the MP3s when you find something you like. You can also visit each Artist's IUMA web site and interact with the artist through email and message boards. If you've got work to do, we suggest you launch IUMA Radio and let your favorite genre play in the background while you work.

thesixtyone
thesixtyone makes music culture more democratic: artists upload their work for review, but, rather than allow a stuffy suit in a boardroom to decide what's good, thousands of listeners do. The best music automagically bubbles up on our homepage where you can listen to the most popular songs for any genre. It's a quick way to find new music for your iPod powered by pure excitement as opposed to some contrived marketing budget.

Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music
So where did it all begin? How did it all start? Who was the first guy who said "Holy shit, this buzzing, spitting, throbbing, pulsing din of an inane sequence of noises that might arguably call itself music sounds totally awesome on ecstasy!" And what made him do that? Click here to find out.

It's About Music
Itsaboutmusic.com prides itself on offering the best of independent music. They have over 200 artists represented on their pages. You can find artists by genre, visit their page for bios and listen to samples of their music. There are free downloads and a download store where you can buy albums and songs from their artists for a reasonable fee.

Mush Records
Mush puts out a wide range of music that might fall into the following categories: electronic instrumental, underground hip-hop, downtempo, abstract hip-hop, experimental, indie-rock, jazz-based grooves, turntablist compositions, electronic pop, saturated folk, left-field, dreamy stuff, more versions of hip-hop, and on and on.

Pure Volume
Pure Volume offers over 125,000 downloadable songs, over 100,000 rising artist profiles.

Unsigned.com
Unsigned.com is the new voice for independent Artists looking for the chance to be discovered! For bands and solo artists,

Acoustic Cafe
Come on in and grab a seat at Acoustic Café, radio's best international showcase for new acoustic music. Each week, we air two hours of great stuff from some of the best singer-songwriters in the business, including rare acoustic cuts, classic tracks, plus exclusive, live in-studio interviews and performances each week. Here on Acoustic Café Online, you'll get a look behind the scenes, with playlists, schedules of upcoming in-studio guests, and a state-by-state listing of where to find the Café on your radio dial. We also bring you great digital audio, too, including interviews, previously un-aired material, exclusive in-studio performances and more.

The All Music Guide
The All Music Guide at allmusic.com is an indispensable resource to all genre's of music. The vast amount of information is broken down into logical and easy to search areas: a true internet gem!

Deezer
The concept is simple: To offer, free of charge and legally, all kinds of music, from rock to hip-hop, jazz, electro and world music… While at the same time, artists and rights owners receive a share of advertising revenue. Deezer has been highly successful due to its innovative offering and philosophy, which was widely hailed by the press. Less than two months after its launch, Deezer announced the acquisition of the catalogues of leading major and independent record companies: Sony BMG, Because Music, Believe… On 14 May 2008, the website announced the signing of an international agreement with the giant Universal Music.

etown
etown's mission is to produce high quality programs of diverse music and conversation in order to entertain, educate and engage a wide audience in appreciating and protecting our cultural and natural resources. Like old-time radio variety shows, every etown show is taped in front of a live audience and features performances from many of today's top musical artists as well as conversation and information. The archive of shows is available for listening by the sites members (free signup).

Chris Milk
Music Vids directed by the very talented Chris Milk. John Mellencamp, Courtney Love and many others.

imeem
imeem is a social network that enables users to discover, interact and express themselves with media, including music, video and photos, and form connections based on shared tastes and interests.

MP3.com
We also really like mp3.com and have filled a good amount of our hard drive with free downloads from this website. There are thousands of musicians represented here from the obscure to the famous with their own pages and info.

Songza
Songza lets you listen to any song or band.

Real Player
Either the Basic Real Player or the RealPlayer Plus ($19.95). We use the plus version.

Music Match Jukebox
New Musicmatch Jukebox 10.0 lets you listen to audio CDs, MP3s, Internet streams, WMAs, WAV files and more. View videos and visualizations in the resizable Media Window and view album, song and artist information while listening. Also create playlists with ease - just drag and drop music files from your Music Library or from any Windows Explorer window to hear your favorite music instantly.

WinAmp
Winamp plays music and video files. It runs seamlessly in the background. No invasive commercials. Access community radio stations in all genres programmed by enthusiasts. Click Here to learn more & then download. Free.

Windows Media Player
Windows Media Player 10 (according to Microsoft) is the all-in-one media player that provides the best experience for discovering, playing and taking your digital entertainment anywhere--on Windows XP PCs and the widest choice of portable devices.

Yahoo Music Engine
Listen to your music or to LAUNCHcast radio. Rate songs, listen to :30 samples, create playlists, download new songs - all through the Yahoo! Music Engine.

eMusic
eMusic is the Internet’s most popular MP3 subscription service. Music lovers who use eMusic have access to over 400,000 pure and open MP3s from over 3,500 record labels. MP3s offer the ultimate music freedom. eMusic MP3s play on any portable music player, can be downloaded to unlimited computers and allow for unlimited CD burning. The other digital music services charge extra or simply do not offer the flexibility eMusic provides to all their customers. eMusic is a completely international site. Any customer from any country throughout the world can sign up and use eMusic! eMusic’s  Every new customer to eMusic can sign up for a free trial subscription, where they can download up to 50 MP3s over 14 days.

iTunes
More than 1 million tracks and 600 independent labels with 30-second previews. Buy entire albums or single tracks. Discover Music. Browse Billboard and radio station charts, music videos, and free weekly downloads. Listen to Audiobooks. Choose from more than 9,000 best-sellers, classics and radio programs. Find music fast. Search for any artist, song or album on the store. Import Music. All your music in one place in AAC, MP3 or Apple Lossless. Create Playlists. Generate lists of your favorites. Dig deep into your library with Party Shuffle. Burn CDs. Burn any playlist. Create CD inserts with mosaics of cover art and track lists. Make backups. Sync with iPod. Sync your music, audiobooks and photos; then listen to or view them on your iPod.
iTunes – Over 1 million songs and growing

Music Now
MusicNow carries a complete digital music collection from the four "major labels": Sony/BMG, EMI, Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group, and is building a never-ending list of independent labels including V2, Rounder, Epitaph, Tommy Boy, Roadrunner, Blue Note, The Orchard, and Astralwerks.

Napster
Napster gives you unlimited access to 750,000+ tracks for $9.95 a month.
When you subscribe to Napster, you can enjoy the following:

• Download an unlimited number of high quality music files to your computer. You can listen to these downloaded tracks online or off-line on up to 3 PCs for as long as you subscribe. You can also save up to 20% when you purchase multiple tracks to burn to CD or transfer to a digital music player
• Listen (via streaming) to an unlimited number of full-length tracks while you are connected to the Internet.
• Tune into Napster's 50+ quality pre-programmed Radio stations. Skip forward or back, look through all the tracks on the station and download your favorites. Create your own radio stations based on music you select.
• Discover and share music with the Napster's community. Share your opinions on our message boards, see what other members are streaming, and browse other members' collections. Click here to get a FREE trial of Napster Premium!

Real Rhapsody
Try RealRhapsody for 14 days FREE and get unlimited listening access to 750,000+ songs from 35,000+ artists.

URGE
URGE is a digital music service from MTV Networks that makes it easy to enjoy, explore and get the music you want for your PC or portable music player. URGE gives you complete access to over 2 million songs, 18 music genres, countless styles and exclusives from MTV, VH1 and CMT. URGE gives you hundreds of playlists and radio stations, music feeds, blogs, interviews and feature stories from leading music voices.

Amir's Music World
Amir is a DJ on WCCR, Purdue University's own radio station. This is his world filled with recommendations and downloads.

Bandnews
Bandnews.org is a search engine keeping track of what is going on in the band scene. A bot collects the news from official band websites and magazines so you can read them on one page.

Classical Net
Classical Net features more than 6800 files including more than 5000 CD, SACD, DVD and Book reviews and over 5300 links to other classical music web sites.

Classic Cat
Classic Cat is a directory with links to over 2800 free to download classical performances on the internet, sorted by composer and work.

Dilandau
Dilandau is an audio search engine.

FineTune
pick any artist, FineTune will build you a custom playlist featuring music by your artist and related artists.

Last.fm
Last.fm tracks what you listen to, learns what you like, and gives you better music. You can use Last.fm to listen to music, find out about artists you may like, other people with similar music taste, gigs in your local area, charts and quilts for your personal site, as well as much more.

Live Music Archive
The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) public nonprofit that was founded to build an ‘Internet library,’ with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Here's a link to their live music files.

Mixtaper
Mixtaper is a site that is dedicated to bringing you new and innovative ways to share online music legally. Mixtapes are compiled by members from various free mp3 sources on the web. You can listen to the mixtapes using various media players. Mixtaper also offers free blogs to mixtaper members.

Mojam
Mojam lets you search for concert information by artist, city or venue.

Musicmobs
Musicmobs is a social network for music fans that allows you to share your listening habits and discover new music.

Music Plasma
Music Plasma helps you identify all the artists who fit your musical tastes. Tell them which bands and artists you like and they give you a list of similar performers. Totally cool!

Musipedia
Musipedia! Inspired by, but not affiliated with Wikipedia, we are building a searchable, editable, and expandable collection of tunes, melodies, and musical themes. Every entry can be edited by anybody. An entry can contain a bit of sheet music, a MIDI file, textual information about the work and the composer, and last but not least the Parsons Code, a rough description of the melodic contour, to make the encyclopedia searchable by melody.

Muso
Muso – the magazine for the younger, more open-minded generation of classical music fans. Designed for young professional musicians, students or music enthusiasts wanting to keep up with the latest news and gossip, Muso provides essential advice on courses and careers as well as celebrity interviews and great competitions.

Mutopia
All music in the Mutopia Project is free to download, print out, perform and distribute. Mutopia is similar in spirit to Project Gutenberg, but consists of free sheet music.

Pandora
Pandora is a music discovery service designed to help you find and enjoy music that you'll love. It's powered by the Music Genome Project, the most comprehensive analysis of music ever undertaken. Just tell us one of your favorite songs or artists and we'll launch a streaming station to explore that part of the music universe.

Polestar
To find concerts in your area, visit Polestar. It's comprehensive and the search is free.

AK Music
AK Music prepares video of emerging artists for submission to agents, promoters, club owners etc.

Artistopia
Artistopia is committed to building the ultimate end-all solution for music artists, musicians, songwriters, and industry professionals to develop and do business in one spot. Armed with comprehensive membership plans, industry experts, expert technologist, business management, and solid online presence, Artistopia is leading the frontier in online artist development.

Berklee Shares
Berklee Shares is:

• Individual self-contained music lessons developed by Berklee faculty and alumni.
• Free and open to the music community around the world.
• A library of MP3 audio, QuickTime movie, and PDF files.
• A glimpse into the educational opportunities provided by Berklee.

Chord Book
Learn Guitar Chords by seeing them and hearing them strummed. This is a great resource for both the novice player and the accomplished.

Chord Studio
Choose chords and styles, hear them instantly.

Common Music
Common Music (CM) is an object-oriented music composition environment. It produces sound by transforming a high-level representation of musical structure into a variety of control protocols for sound synthesis and display. Common Music defines an extensive library of compositional tools and an API through which the composer can easily modify and extend the system. CM is released under the LLGPL (Lisp Lesser General Public License).

Essential Guitar Guide
First published on the web in 1995, is the original 13 page version of the guide remains available as a free resource to guitar players old and new. The idea behind the guide is to cut through the confusion that often surrounds music theory and provide a means to apply practical music theory in the real world.

EZFOLK
ezfolk.com  is Richard Hefner's folk musicians paradise.

Guitar Noise
Guitar Noise offers free online guitar lessons, short pithy reviews, career advice for musicians, songwriting pointers, and much more. With millions of visitors, thousands of forum members, and hundreds of exclusive lessons for all levels, Guitar Noise is one of the friendliest musician communities in the world. Everything is free and there is no need to register for anything.

Guitar Player TV
Lessons, performances and information on guitars, presented freely by Guitar Magazine.

Harmony Central
Harmony-central.com  provides links to everything musical. This Website is a treasure trove of musical resources.

iVideosongs
iVideosongs is all about this new kind of musical experience, a personal connection that happens when you learn your favorite songs from the original artists who wrote and performed those songs. The artists are legends and legends in the making. We also have some titles featuring killer studio musicians, because not every artist is involved yet and some others have passed to the great gig in the sky. In every case the songs are complete, accurate and shot in stunning, lush, high definition video. The combination rocks. iVideosongs is an affordable and practical alternative to expensive private lessons and the poor quality song fragments, phrases, tab and tips scattered around the Internet. With artist and instructor titles, and also tutorials downloaded from iVideosongs, you can indulge in the experience any time you want, as often as you want, anywhere you want.

Jam Studio
Jam Studio is an intuitive music making utility allowing you to create music, change tempos and add instruments to your songs.

The Mudcat Cafe
The Mudcat Cafe - a very cool place. It has a folksong database, forums, auctions and much more.

MusicTheory.net
Music theory, lessons and trainers are all together here in a great flash based interface that is even downloadable.

On Line Guitar Archive
OLGA  is a library of files that show you how to play songs on guitar. The files come from other internet guitar enthusiasts like yourself, who took the time to write down chords or tablature and send them to the archive or to the newsgroups

ResoGuit
www.resoguit.com is the best place on the net for resonator guitar player resources.   

Ultimate Guitar
Ultimate-Guitar.Com is the fastest growing guitar community on the net -- it's the only guitar website that has gear and cd reviews, music news, guest columns, guitar and bass lessons and tabs in one place! And don't forget about the coolest guitar community of guitarists on the planet!

WholeNote
WholeNote is a place where all the some-time, full-time, part-time, and not-enough-time guitarists can go to grok musical knowledge and contribute what they know to their fellow players.

Elderly Instruments
Elderly Instruments of  Lansing Michigan is guitar heaven. A must visit store.

Liberty Resonator Guitars
Liberty Resonator Guitars are awesome and so is Bill Blue, their maker. We own one. We know.

Taylor Guitars
We think Taylor Guitars are the best acoustic instruments on the planet. If we had an unlimited budget, we'd own one of each! 

Musician's Friend
We love the Musician's Friend. Their site is more than a musical instrument store. They have reviews of instruments and equipment that are invaluable in making a selection. We also like the scratched and dented section where a huge amount of items at very good prices are for sale.

Guitar Trader
If you play Acoustic Guitars like we do, then you might visit the Guitar trader website. They have a review section that includes tutorials and tips to make you sound like a pro.

Music 123
music123.com is the outgrowth of a 75 year old family-run business that spans four generations. There are now over 125,000 products available on the site. The depth of product information is unequaled, and new products and services are featured daily.
 

CD Baby
CD Baby only sells CDs that come directly from the musicians. No distributors. Musicians send them CDs. They warehouse them, sell them to you, and pay the musicians directly.

Collector's Choice Music
If what you're looking for is in the "hard to find" category,  Collectors' Choice Music is the best place to look for it.

Buy.com
We like to check out the prices of the sale items at buy.com. They have a very good selection too.

Steal My Music
StealMyMusic.com, where every CD is free.

Sony Music Direct
It pays to visit the hot picks at Sony Music Direct. The premise of this site is that Sony deep discounts a portion of their catalog and then sells it on this ever changing website. Good deals on box sets are found here on a regular basis,

Prolifica Records
Prolifica Records offers up independent artists of no specific genre, but all cutting edge.

I Classics
www.iclassics.com is not only a key source for classical recordings, but their time line is worthy of inclusion in our academic resources page.

Andante
Discover the andante CD collection's rare and landmark classical recordings. Click here to learn more..

ArkivMusic
Here's something we've wanted to do. Buy Classical Music CDs by Conductor Browse Now at ArkivMusic