We’re written before about websites dedicated to providing mixtapes or playlists – both of which are names for compilations of songs recorded in a specific order. Sites like 8tracks and Songza allow you to play your favorite lists of songs from right within the browser. However, many folks want to move a step beyond and have their playlists embedded in their own blog, website or page on a social media site like Facebook.
Most of these sites obtain their music by searching the web for legal copies of songs or songs/videos. None of these sites actually host any music or get involved in paying any music licensing fees. So even when they accidentally stumble on and list music that is not legal – that music is never stored on their servers – so they try and stay out of hot water from the Recording Industry (RIAA). That said, it appears that the RIAA is finally impacting innovation or perhaps it’s just the world economy – but you’ll find a ton of sites not worth your time or at best meeting only one specific need. You’ll also find sites cropping up everyday so we have not reviewed them all. But – we’ve dug through many sites to pick a few 3 heart ♥♥♥ winners.
Finetune has been around longer than most of the sites here and has features galore – but that power is also it’s limitation. Finetune has so many flavors and versions that it’s not that easy to use their website or setup the widgets. Folks who have “grown up” using Finetune since it’s early days just love it – but new folks find it hard to acclimate.
Since Finetune is built on the Flash Platform it has versions across many platforms. Finetune has a Flash Player for the web player and the Wii version and they are using Flex and Apollo to deploy a version of Finetune on the desktop. They also have a widget that allows you to embed your playlists on a blog or your MySpace profile. Finetune for the Wii pulls your stored profile data and gives you access to all of it from the your television. It’s the perfect example of how the Flash Platform allows you to extend your reach with very little changes to the code. Finetune in many ways is the ideal Rich Internet Application – far more advanced than many of the applications shown here.
Unlike most of these playlist services, Finetune has it’s own music library with almost 2 million tracks and growing including major labels and the biggest independents. It’s a fine choice – but the website interface is cluttered and it’s hard to get started – but if you spend the time, you will be rewarded by Finetune’s music library and features. They also have a new service, Tune-in, that we’ll give a full review to shortly.
Flash MP3 Player is a free application that allows you to play music on your website easy and fast. You won’t need any programming skills to install or use it. Just embed it into your website and player will automatically scan a specified folder and form a playlist.
Now, while you won’t need any programming skills, you will need to feel comfortable uploading and downloading files and installing/configuring software. This is the easiest Mp3 player to install – but every software install takes a little work. If you want support with the setup, you will have to pay for the registered version. The paid version is exactly the same as the free version, except it doesn’t include the advertising logo.
According to VEXiS, the maker or iZaRia, they “aim to unite the world’s music online, by utilising copyright-compliant API’s in order to bring the best of music to users. Through the support of advertising, VEXiS plans to attract great numbers with the lure of free and legal music; iZaRia the first legal incarnation of its kind.” A pretty aggressive goal, but even launching a site of this magnitude is an impressive feat for a one person company, especially when that one person is 16 year old Charles Allatt, who is the head of online enterprise company: VEXiS Media. That said the fact that the terms and conditions page starts off with “Our legal terms have been unfortunately misinterpreted by some websites and individuals. We have updated them more clearly at this location; iZaRia is NOT illegal.”
You can compare iZaRia to Pick Music (further down this article) and I actually like the interface better than Pick Music – but given the limited likelihood of this site getting traction and not getting sued I would suggest you veer away. I give Charles Allatt a lot of credit for building this – but without some clearer explanation of where the music is coming from this site is doomed.
MyFlashFetish lets you create music or video playlist and cool widgets for your MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, Windows Live Spaces, blogs, websites & more. The service is absolutely FREE! The MyFlashFetish site allows you to make playlist widgets as well as widgets that don’t involve music. The site now takes you to MixPod once you start working on a playlist and this site also includes a place to post your playlists. As you can see below, the widgets that go along with your playlist are among the best – and this is only a partial screen capture of all your options.
But MixPod is more than just eye candy with a great variety of styles to select from, including mini cassette tapes, iPods, and other various button style players – it is also easy to use. The range of available music is great – and you are not tied to videos as you are with other playlist sites. There are links to lyrics, to buy the music even to make ringtones.
But the best feature, which truly separates this from the rest is that you can upload songs you own and add them to your playlists. If you’ve done this before – it’s pretty easy. If you are new then it will take some time to setup your MP3 uploading.
Since many iTunes fans are fooled by this option, we’ve included it here – but with a negative score. Apple offers My iTunes, a series of embeddable widgets to post your iTunes purchases, iTunes reviews and iTunes favorites to your blog or profile page. My iTunes gives you an effortless way to keep your friends up-to-date with your favorite music, TV shows, movies, and more. The drawback: the widgets don’t actually play any music, they simply list artists and songs with links back to iTunes. So My iTunes is not really a playlist – just a sales pitch to get your visitors to go to iTunes.
This site is all about playlists – nothing more. Pick Music gives you the chance to create your own playlists of music from videos and the ability to share that playlist with another website.
You can register for free without a long registration form which is nice. You can search for songs from thousands of music videos to stream on your website. Once you create a playlist you can share it with 28 different social media sites inclusing sites like LiveJournal, MySpace, Friendster, Xanga and Facebook. However, Pick Music has no control over any of the videos it links to and when those videos go offline you playlist just shows video not found.
If you want to create your own playlists for free to host on your social media website or blog without having to use any complicated device or feature, then Pick Music will meet your needs.
Royalty free music downloads are instantly available from premiumbeat.com’s music library. Music purchased from Premiumbeat.com’s production library is royalty free which means means that all you pay is a one-time fee for a user license. Once you have paid the one time fee, you can then use the royalty free music you’ve purchased as many times as you wish for as long as you like in accordance with the terms stated in the license agreement. You never have to pay any additional royalty fees based on usage and the music copyright police will never come after you.
Okay – so that’s the good news. However, the bad news is pretty bad. First, the prices are expensive – an average of 30 bucks a song which tells you why so many music sites have struggled to pay these fees based on ad revenues while giving the music away for free. Even if the price is not a killer for you – the music selection sucks unless you happen to dig elevator music.
So even if you got over the price and the song selection, now you have to install a music player on your website. Key there is your website or your blog, installing a flash music player is going to be forbidden on most of the social media sites. Installing the music player on your web site is going to require some technical skill or the patience to follow directions. And, to top it all off, the music player you install will carry the premiumbeat logo unless you are willing to anotehr 20 or even 30 dollars depending upon which flash player you choose.
Bottom line – using premiumbeat.com should be left to a small or midsized company that has a programmer and wants some background music for their website. For a fun social media website – the premiumbeat is not your beat.
dagsmith
MusicPlayer.me Contributor
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