Music from the Cloud
As I’m in the middle of writing two papers for law school, I´d love to have some nice music playing in the background to somehow sweeten the experience. I do have some music on my PC, but I don´t want to get distracted because I need to switch tracks, etc. Besides, I’d like to expand my musical taste, which I feel is getting a little stale over time. All of this, plus a broadband ´net connection, brings one’s mind to…Internet radio and music services. So, let´s have a brief look of our options.
First and foremost, there´s last.fm. Everybody talks about last.fm, a lot of people have an account there because it´s so cool and it costs you only $3 to use… unless you´re from the US, UK or Germany. Of course, I like Americans, Germans and (somewhat) the Brits, but this is just fucking discrimination against me based on my citizenship. You either make everyone pay, or make it free and seek additional ways to monetize your services (ads, premium accounts with extra features, hundreds of ways, actually). So, I’m either trying to listen to last.fm via a German/UK/US Tor exit node, or just forget about it.
I would even register and buy a subscription if it weren’t for the discrimination issue, because it’s not a matter of $3/mo., it’s a matter of principle. Hinting me that I’m any worse than somebody living in Germany, US or UK, is absolutely outrageous, which decisively sends them last.fm guys down the drain.
Another option is listening to the music on your page at VKontakte. VK lets you add any music to your page and play it free indefinitely. It even has playlists, but, alas! – no shuffle or music suggestion like last.fm. VKontakte enables you to have your playlists with you wherever you go (that is, with a ‘net connection, of course), but after a while it starts boring you to listen to the same music, in the same order. The two solutions I’ve found is 1) to make a group (which I did) lobbying to add the shuffle feature to VKontakte (and possibly music suggestion later on, analyzing the listening habits of millions of people) and 2) listen to music on other people’s pages, which both expands your musical taste and lets you know them better.
As for today, I stopped my search at Jamendo. This place offers a lot of indie music (which is not bad at all, by the way) to listen to and download for free, under CreativeCommons licenses. I believe there’s even a Rhythmbox plugin for Jamendo.
Happy with what I’ve found for now, I can get back to my papers.
Have a great, melodic day!
Tags: cloud, jamendo, last.fm, music, vkontacte