CyberNotes: Soundpedia – Listen to Entire Albums of Songs for Free

Weekend Website

There are several well known web-based music services available, and probably one of the most popular is Pandora which allows you to create “stations” based upon your old and new favorites.  Another great music service that hasn’t really managed to get plastered all over the radar yet is Soundpedia, and I think that it deserves some attention.

Soundpedia allows you to listen to streamed music or watch videos right from your browser.  While you can listen to entire albums, you’re not allowed to download any of the content. They have a large sampling of everything from independent artists, to commercial artists, and it’s all free. You just stream the content using their built-in player.

Registration

If you want to simply listen to music, it’s free and no registration is required.  If you decide that you want to create playlists however, you’ll need to create a login. It’s still free though. And if you’re wanting to listen to albums, if you don’t have an account, you’ll only have access to the first five songs. After registration, you’ll have access to them all.

Features

While the songs are playing in a separate window, it shows you the lyrics (pictured to the left) to the song if they have them available.  While you’re listening to songs, you can:

• Add them to a playlist (registration required)
• Add a comment (registration required)
• Select to “repeat all” songs

The play and pause controls are found under the lyrics, and the sound quality is decent.  Definitely not perfect, but it’s decent.

Advertising

One of my only complaints is the way they’ve decided to monetize the site.  It needs to be monetized, there’s no doubt about that.  However, I think they need to come up with a new method.  Currently, at inconvenient moments ads will appear where you’ll be required “click to skip” (or wait a few seconds for it to disappear) in order to go on.  The types of ads that take up the whole page that must be clicked to be removed is a bit much.

You’ll also find ads at the bottom of the player which are discreet and don’t take away from the experience.

Independent artists

Independent artists have a great opportunity to share their music at Soundpedia.  Using Soundpedia, you can upload your songs and then view live statistics of your music so that you know how many people have listened to it.  You’ll also get a profile, a journal, and a photo gallery to share important information with others.

Extras

If you’re a Mac User, Apple has a Dashboard widget available for download that will make it easy for you to perform a Soundpedia Music Search right from your computer.

Searching

Soundpedia makes it easy to search for your favorite songs, artists, or movies. They break both the music and the videos down into genres and artists .  You can also use their search box, or browse for artists by clicking on the first letter of their first name.

Version 2 Coming soon

They’ve been around for just about 7 months, and now they’re getting ready to release version 2. The new version will be mostly changes to the graphical user interface, however there will be new players, and they’ll be adding video channels. They’ll also be adding a rating system where you’ll be able to promote artists or albums to the front page (I’m thinking Digg, kinda).

For only being around 7 months, Soundpedia is a great service and worth checking out. While it isn’t the best sound quality, it will give you a chance to listen to some of your favorite songs that you don’t want to purchase, or that you don’t have access to anywhere else. It also gives independent artists an additional place where they can get their music heard.

Source: Thanks for the tip Jack of all Trades!