I spend a lot of time on my computer. One of the things I routinely do is stream music down to my computer over the internet. My Mac has a nice 3 piece Bose speaker system attached to it. The sound on it kicks ass in all the right places. The best way to take advantage of it is to stream music down the pipe. I am going to look at several sites that you might want to check out if you are interested in doing the same. You don’t need to buy a bunch of CDs anymore. For the price of just a few CDs, you can stream unlimited music to your PC all year long.

Yahoo Music

I am a user and subscriber to Yahoo Music and I really dig this service. Their music selection is good, and I routinely find lesser known artists I’m looking for appear in the library. This means they are adding more stuff as time goes. The software you will need is Yahoo Music Jukebox. You can manage your music library with Jukebox as well as access LaunchCast radio, the free streaming radio service by Yahoo. For a fee, you can access the 2 million song music library. This is what I use and I love it because I can listen to any artist, album or song I want. Pricing is $8.99 billed monthly or $71.88 for a year, with a 14 day free trial.

Just a note that Yahoo Music is the replacement for the MusicMatch service (which no longer exists).

Napster

Napster gained notoriety years ago for being a file exchange service which was rife with illegally distributed MP3s. Napster got legal, though, and is now a streaming music service just like Yahoo Music. Napster comes in at $9.95 per month for an advertised 5 million songs.

Rhapsody

Rhapsody comes in with a higher price of $12.99/month and up. The $12.99 plan gives you pretty much the same thing as you get with Yahoo. For $14.99/month, you can upgrade your plan to allow you to transfer songs to your portable media player (if compatible with Rhapsody). This is a nice touch. Other services offer the downloading of music to your MP3 player, however you need to individually buy the MP3. So, it is nice to be able to listen to the music wherever you are - even if you’re not on your computer. Just make sure you get a player designed for Rhapsody. The reason for this is so that you can “rent” the music even when its on your player. You are not getting regular MP3 files, for obvious reasons. For this reason, though, most MP3 players are not compatible with this rental model, including the Apple Ipod.

The Inevitable Comparison

So, which is best? Well, I have already said I am a Yahoo subscriber. That should give you a clue. Here’s why, though:

• Yahoo is cheaper across the board. The yearly plan puts Yahoo at $5.99/month, which is much cheaper than the competition.
• Yahoo’s player is pretty good. Jukebox is actually good enough to use to manage the rest of your music collection, whether from Yahoo or not.

The other specs are quite competitive among them. The song quantity, to me, is meaningless. Quite frankly, there is no way to verify their claims. Even though Yahoo is boasting the smallest number of available songs of the three, I can attest to the fact that I VERY rarely find a song that isn’t available in Yahoo.

So, I gotta hand it to Yahoo. Quality service at a great price. I can’t help but wonder what would happen is Google ever got in on this market.

The Freebies

OK, the options above are paid subscription services. You get what you pay for, of course, but that doesn’t mean there are not some good services out there which you can use for free. Here are a few to get you started:

• Live365
• Pandora. Enter a song or artist name and you will get a custom radio station with similar music. You do not have the fine-tuned control you would have with the paid options above, but you can listen as long as you want for free.
• Shoutcast. Listen to a wide array of internet radio stations using the WinAMP player.
• Last.FM - free to listen, but the site is an interesting model for artists or labels to make their music available to the internet community. Almost like social networking meets the world of music consumption.
• Itunes. Yes, you can listen to freely available internet radio stations right from within the well-known music client from Apple.
• Finetune
• Radio Tower
• Jango

So, get out there and find some music you like. The days of the CD are over. At least for me.