Radiohead has already done it and now another well-known group is releasing its latest album for free, but this release is on a much bigger scale.

Smashing Pumpkins has announced through its official website that the latest album, entitled Teargarden by Kaleidyscope, will be released for free on the Internet. The new material consists of 44 new tracks which will be released one at a time beginning on Halloween. The posting makes it very clear these are totally free with no information required from the downloader:

Each song will be made available absolutely for free, to anyone anywhere. There will be no strings attached. Free will mean free, which means you won’t have to sign up for anything, give an email address, or jump through a hoop. You will be able to go and take the song or songs as you wish, as many times as you wish.

Once all the songs are available Smashing Pumpkins will then release the money-making versions. Those will include a very limited release of 11 EP’s each containing 4 songs with collectible art and possibly additional material included. There will also be digital, paid-for releases of some songs that come with additional demo versions of tracks not otherwise available. Finally a deluxe box set will also be available that contains all the songs, but not all of the material available in the EP’s.

These different versions of the song releases are aimed at collectors with the 44 tracks remaining available for free alongside them. So far the group has 53 songs to play with making it clear if you pay for the music you are going to get something extra. Read more at SmashingPumpkins.com

Windows only: Microsoft's Zune HD was released yesterday and it looks great, but whether you've got the latest Zune, an older model, or just like the Zune desktop player, Zune 4.0 brings new features and an improved look to desktop music players.

The Zune player sets itself apart from iTunes in one important way (not including the whole iPod vs. Zune support). As the Zune marketing folks put it: "Browse music, not spreadsheets." That is to say, the Zune player doesn't have the all-business text columns like iTunes, focusing instead on a rich graphical interface. (Though iTunes album views have headed in this direction, too.) It's a refreshing way to look at music, even though after playing with it, I'm not sure I really like it better. It seems better suited for a television and remote than monitor and mouse, and the way the new Quickplay page reacts to my mouse movements takes some getting used to. That said, it does look very nice. The update has also added:

• A new Quickplay page gives you "instant access to the stuff you care about most with shortcuts to favorites, recently downloaded or played music, and more."
• The Smart DJ feature can generate related playlists starting from any song on your computer and some music from the Zune Marketplace. (Think of it like Genius in iTunes.)
• An expanded Zune Marketplace includes more HD movies and TV shows.

Zune 4.0 is a free download, available for Windows 7, Vista, or XP. If you have a 64-bit version of Windows 7 or Vista, download the 64-bit version of the Zune software.

First launched back in 2006 as a CD trading service, Lala has evolved along with its market into the most comprehensive web-based service for listening to your music online and music downloads. Its offerings include full length album previews, an online store with 7 million songs, DRM-free high quality variable bit rate MP3 music downloads, a web-based music jukebox and social network, all in one tightly knit interface.

Once you’ve created an account, which doesn’t take more than 30 seconds and doesn’t require a credit card, you can preview whole songs and albums for free (once). Your existing music library can be easily imported using the Lala Music Mover, a small application that matches songs on your computer with the catalog of music downloads available online. It works on Windows as well as on Macs and doesn’t use a lot of resources. Once the upload process is completed, you can listen to all of your songs online, with no additional charge, no restrictions or ads, from any computer with an Internet connection. It will even import playlists and ratings (using the beta version).

Individual tracks can be purchased and downloaded in MP3 format without DRM and a high quality variable bit rate encoding. Downloads are automatically added to your iTunes or Windows Media Player if you installed the Lala Music Mover. For ten cents you can purchase the right to stream a song from the website as many times as desired, a so-called “web song“. Depending on the song popularity and release date, MP3 music downloads range from $0.79 to $1.29, the same pricing scheme of the iTunes Music Store. Lala has strong connections with the music industry and currently indexes over 7 million songs. The only caveat to this service is that it only works with United States IP addresses due to music licenses. Of course, you guys know how to get passed that. Go to Lala, give it a try and then come back to share your experiences in the comments. For more posts related to music, you should definitely have a look at MakeUseOf’s music section.

The jukebox in the sky is a reality. When I started this blog two years ago, it was all but impossible to open a Web browser, type a song name, and have that song start playing immediately. Now, it's commonplace.

I still like the simple approach of Grooveshark--the other night, my brother and I set up a running DJ battle on it to reminisce and introduce each other to new tunes--but Meuzer is an interesting alternative. Search on a song or artist name, and Meuzer pulls results from YouTube--very similar to the Muziic app I looked at earlier this year--as well as Imeem and other third-party sources. Click any of the results, and you get a four-arrow widget that lets you play, share, rate, or add the song to a playlist. Hit "play," and the song begins playing in an embedded window depending on the original source (a YouTube result begins playing a small YouTube video, for instance). Other features require you to log in, and currently the only way to do that is with a Facebook ID.

Meuzer seems to have a broader selection of music than Grooveshark: a search on Roy Harper's "The Game"--a song I couldn't find on Grooveshark for the DJ battle with my brother--got several results from YouTube. But I don't like the forced log-in, particularly for the essential playlist feature, and the search results aren't organized nearly as well. For instance, searching for the dub artist Scientist returned multiple results for "The Scientist" by Coldplay (eww) but no Scientist. On Grooveshark, I simply selected the Artists tab and the top 10 results were all Scientist tunes. Still, Meuzer could be a useful fallback for songs I can't find on other services. Try it out yourself: Search Meuzer.

Napster unveiled a redesigned music service Monday, post Best Buy-acquisition, with a new subscription offering that may raise a few eyebrows.

For $5 per month, users can download and keep any five DRM-free MP3 tracks from Napster's catalog of more than seven million songs. So far, no big deal; that's the same as what Apple charges for many DRM-free AAC files, and slightly more than many singles from Amazon MP3. It's also reminiscent of eMusic's monthly MP3 download service. But here's where it gets interesting: as part of that fee, you also get unlimited streaming of all seven million tracks, for listening as often as you like.

There are a few strings attached that Napster isn't calling attention to: namely, that those tracks are DRM'ed unlike the MP3 downloads, and that you can only listen to those tracks on your desktop PC. You can't move them to a portable device (a la Napster To Go, which is still available and which costs more, or Napster Mobile--although you may want to skip that last one, given our experience with it).

Essentially, Napster is throwing in unlimited full song previews instead of 30-second clips. That even exceeds Lala's 10-cent-per-song offering for desktop PCs as well (which lets you listen to any song once, but then pay 10 cents and get unlimited listening). Napster is also offering more than 60 commercial-free radio stations, 1,400 programmed theme-based playlists, and an automix "seed" feature that creates a custom, Internet radio-style channel.

Spotify, already the best music app on the planet, is coming to a device near you. We’re talking XBoxes, PlayStations, Slingbox, mobile phones, networked audio players, SlimDevices — any place developers want to put it.

The release Tuesday night of libspotify, the company’s Application Programming Interface, means that the sky is the limit: Any developer (for approved devices) can build apps that access Spotify’s massive music catalog and use its P2P architecture, which streams Ogg Vorbis files between users like a streaming version of BitTorrent.

The bad news: It’s still not legally available in the United States and lots of other places, though there are ways to fake being in another country. In fact, this is great news at the moment only for music lovers in Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom. But those who have tried Spotify know it’s like a magical version of iTunes in which you’ve already bought every song in the world — and it’s free to use if you can put up with a 20-second ad every half an hour.

"With the release of libspotify, we hope to empower our users to build upon what we’ve started and come up with imaginative and innovative new ways of interacting with Spotify," reads the blog post announcing the program. "There are hundreds of features that users have suggested to add to Spotify and by taking this step, we hope to encourage the developer community to expand our service." (Developers should note that the API key cannot be shared, so resulting programs can’t be open source.)

As a journalist and beta tester, I’ve had access to Spotify for months, and my valid Spotify username should mean I’ll be able to use whatever programs result from this API. However, anyone who can’t use Spotify will also not be able to use apps developed with the API. According to a line in the agreement, "You may not make the API, Service or Content available to any person who is not a user having valid login credentials for the Service issued by Spotify."

Hopefully, for the sake of U.S. music fans, this delay in rolling out the service stateside is a mere matter of getting ducks in a row, rather than another frustrating instance of the music industry dragging its heels on new technology. Otherwise, Spotify could be available on videogame consoles in Europe before it’s even available on computers in the states.

After the revolutionary Kazaa, LimeWire, and Napster movement of free peer-to-peer music downloads gave way, other less effective imitating software was developed. However, this isn’t one of them. Muziic, an online music player, enables you to search through a wide variety of songs in a music catalog that showcases all types of genres all the way from classical hits to hip-hop or R&B. You’re also able to view small clips that are associated with the song of your choice, courtesy of YouTube.

The first thing you have to do is running Muziic and wait till the server connection is established. As soon as the complete Muziic player window opens you can scroll through the list of genres on the left side. Open up a genre and view songs that have been previously uploaded by other users by simply clicking on its name. Once you’ve browsed through the list and found songs you want to listen to, just click on the plus sign next to the song and it will be instantly added to your playlist.

Now in order to play the songs in your playlist all you have to do is double click on the song and it will begin to load and play on the music player at the top left hand corner.

Muziic player also allows you to configure the quality of your songs depending on your Internet connection speed by clicking on the Settings tab and choosing between Standard and HQ Stereo (HQ Stereo requires faster speeds).

There were a few things I wasn’t too fond of. It doesn’t have the option to listen to radio stations like you can with Last.fm or Spotify. I also found no easy way to manage the playlist or quickly browse through it as well.

However, once you take all of these things into consideration and the fact that it’s a free music player you’ll see past a few of the drawbacks (since you can’t have everything) and you can begin to enjoy free music with Muziic.

As the world witnesses the spectacle of the Pirate Bay trial, a new and quietly growing music torrent indexing site adds albums, listens to user feedback, and provides new functionality. Coda.fm is the best little site for exploring music torrents we've seen since OiNK.cd was shut down in 2007. It's redefining what bittorrent can do for music sharing, and user registration is open.

Coda.fm opened to the public only two months ago, but it already has 5,000 registered users and more than 1,000 indexed torrents. What makes Coda.fm special is its exclusive focus on full album torrents. By narrowing the site's focus, it can optimize its user interface to make music browsing fun exploration rewarding. This also allows site moderators to manually check each torrent submitted to the site for correct metadata and torrent health. As a result, users are significantly more likely to find quality recordings on Coda.fm than by just searching The Pirate Bay or Mininova.

The navigation of the site can be compared to some of the better e-commerce sites, with listings of popular and new artists and albums, and the option to browse through different genres. On top of that, the site has a full-blown recommendation engine that makes it a great tool to discover new music, especially when combined with the album reviews and artist bios. Two RSS feeds cover new album releases and recently added torrents, and the site's Twitter account tweets a steady stream of recently added content. The Twitter account, especially, makes it easy to quickly find desirable content as it is uploaded.

Coda.fm offers a simply beautiful user experience thus far unparalleled by other torrent sites, and even by some big online retailers (Amazon, for instance). If you like music, like free, like technology or hate the RIAA, I highly suggest you create an account, look around and download some albums.

While there are some legitimate digital music download sites in China - including 9Sky, Top100 and the recently launched Wawawa - digital music is proving to be a tough sell in the P.R.C, partly because of the market dominance of Baidu’s free mp3 search. There are, however, people making decent profit in this as yet unmeasurable market: the hackers of Apple’s iTunes store gift vouchers and their local agents. In China’s biggest C2C online shopping site Taobao, $200USD iTunes gift cards are for sale at 17.9 RMB (≈ $2.6 USD).

There are thousands of cards for sale at the same time. Choose one seller whose Taobao IM is online, talk to him a little bit, purchase his product and pay money to Taobao’s online payment system, Alipay, which supports most banks in China. All the seller actually sells is the gift voucher code which they send you directly through Taobao’s IM software. You can then redeem the card in your iTunes account. Once successfully redeemed you click ‘confirm’ and Alipay transfers your 18 RMB to the seller and you're free to start downloading.

The owner of the Taobao shop told us frankly that the gift card codes are created using key-generators. He also said that he paid money to use the hackers’ service. Half a year ago, when they started the business, the price was around 320 RMB for 200 USD card, then more people went into this business and the price went all the way down to 18 RMB per card, “but we make more money as the amount of customers is growing rapidly.”

“The hackers are based in China, but I don’t know if they do the same thing in eBay”, the Taobao shopkeeper said.”Most of our customers use iTunes store for music, then Apple applications (bear in mind that the iPhone is only available in the grey market in mainland China) and films. iPod games are least popular.”

It does seem unfair... you paid for those songs and now you can't play them outside of the iTunes environment, on hardware not supported by Apple, or on operating systems not supported by iTunes.

That's because the iTunes tracks that you purchase and download are in a "protected" AAC or M4P audio format. Only it's not you that is being protected, it's Apple, or rather Apple's bottom line. Apple explains this by saying that their proprietary format gives you superior sound quality, but that's a smokescreen. It's all about DRM, and DRM is all about the money.

The ability to make copies of copyrighted materials is seen by the recording industry as a threat to its profitability, and perhaps rightly so. DRM (Digital Rights Management) was created by digital media publishers so they could control the duplication and dissemination of their content. But DRM is actually a misnomer. Because rather than granting rights, DRM actually restricts the consumer from doing perfectly valid and reasonable things with music they own.

There are many ways to remove DRM protection from iTunes music. On Windows OS, you can remove the DRM from iTunes music using the burn-and-rip method or you can turn to programs like TuneClone and DoubleTwist. On Mac OS X, iMovie is the perfect solution to removing DRM from iTunes music. Besides, freewares like FairGame is also a pretty good choice. This article is dedicated to introducing several methods of removing the nasty DRM from iTunes music on Windows and Mac OS X.

For many users Pandora is Internet radio. The service, which was spawned from the Music Genome Project, is one of the pioneers of the genre. In addition to being a great source of free music, Pandora was long free of audio ads, but its business model finally fell afoul of the recording industry, resulting in a protracted legal battle over licensing fees. As a result, Pandora has finally introduced audio ads into the stream. They're less intrusive than the ones on Slacker, its main competitor. Slacker plays about one song's worth of ads per hour (that's the official word from a Slacker spokesperson, though he said it's often less than that); Pandora plays just one ad for 15 seconds every two hours. It's a small price to pay for what remains a killer Internet radio service, even if it still lags behind Slacker in a few key areas.

There are a lot of music jukeboxes out there that aren't iTunes but still work with iPods. Freeware standalone version Floola (RAR) (22,5 MB) for Windows, Mac, and Linux is one of the few, if only, portable music players that not only works with your iPod, it will work from your iPod, too. The program's fully compatible with your desktop iTunes installation, but can be run from the iPod itself.

The features it offers are comprehensive and robust, including music, video, note-taking, and photo support. The latest version, released today, includes bi-directional Google Calendar synchronization. Don't let the simple interface fool you, there's an incredible amount that you can do with Floola, which the publisher states is compatible with Windows 98 and newer, Mac OS X 10.3.9 and newer, and any GTK2 Linux distro.

Floola doesn't play very well with non-Apple jukeboxes and might require you to reformat or ''repair'' your iPod, but once you've got it going it's worth exploring. Album art, lyrics, playlists, podcasts, and Last.fm scrobbling are all supported from Floola. The context menu available from any given track will tell you which playlists the track is in, as well as giving you the option to add it to another one. Note that although album art is supported, there is no baked-in art discovery feature.

The Edit Song feature not only lets you change the track information, but adjust the track's specific volume, discover the real location of the track in Apple's labyrinthine iPod architecture, and instantly change a track from Song to Audiobook. The Song menu in the menubar contains options for drag-and-dropping folders, copying songs from your iPod to your desktop, and downloading tracks from the Web. This feature is quite cool: it lets you download a video, and then rip out the audio track to save as a new song or just load the video onto your iPod. Keyboard jockeys have hot key commands for all these features.

One of the essential things that Floola does, of course, is preclude the need for a desktop synchronization program. Since it runs from a self-contained EXE file that can live on your iPod, and it weighs in at a paltry 23 MB for the Windows version, one of the key concerns with jukeboxes has been effectively eliminated. Other support features include Snarl for Windows and Growl for Mac, built-in format conversion, and duplicated and lost song finder.

There are many ways to legally download music from the Internet. The various methods depend on the legal situation in individual countries. It can be said however that it is completely legal to record music from Internet Radio stations. Another definitely legal way is to download music that has been uploaded by the artist or the record company for public download.

An unique software program that combines both concepts (and more) in one package:

1. ESP is an Internet radio player which gives the listener access to the Shoutcast directory of Internet Radios (delivering outstanding sound quality)
2. Download legal mp3's (no P2P network) from playing artists. ESP will automatically search for songs uploaded to their official social networking sites and makes them available for direct download
3. In addition, the currently playing stream, can be ripped and recorded, saving each track broadcast as a seperate mp3, with the artist and song title making up the filename of the mp3
4. ESP is very light and can even be run from a Flash/USB drive.

I got an email from the fine folks at Slacker this morning informing me that their iPhone (and iPod touch) app is now live on iTunes. Like the Blackberry version, this app is completely free, and oh so awesome I might add.

Slacker Mobile for iPhone and iPod touch:
-Free music library featuring millions of songs
-High-quality stereo playback from any wireless connection
-Over 100 professionally programmed genre stations
-Create custom artist stations
-Fine tune stations to play more of the music you like
-View artist biographies and photos
-View album art and reviews
-"Peek Ahead" artist and album preview
-Pause and skip songs
-Rate songs as favorites
-Ban the songs and artists you don't like.

Slacker radio app at iTunes
Slacker is really going the extra mile. They've worked really hard on this app, so I'm surprised they're not charging for it. I'd gladly pay something for it if I owned an iPhone or Blackberry. Hopefully this strategy pays off for them and the service becomes a success.
Continue reading to see screens of the Slacker radio app on the Apple iPhone...
[ Read the rest ... ]

Spotify is a lean, downloadable application that lets users stream music instantly from its library--a library built with the blessing of EMI Music, Sony BMG, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and some smaller record labels. That, of course, begs the question: how does it make money? Spotify offers two ways to use its service, a free service sponsored by ads, and a paid subscription service.

Once downloaded, the service allows users to search its music catalog by artist, genre, or title, and stream the tracks on-demand any number of times. One of the cooler features is the ability to create and share playlists (a la the now-defunct Muxtape). And the service recently added the ability to scrobble the songs you listen to through Spotify on Last.fm.

That's the good news. Now for the bad news: It isn't officially available in the U.S. yet (though a Digg commenter did provide a way for people to try it out Stateside, at least temporarily). Right now it can be accessed in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. And the company plans to roll out its service to new markets in 2009, according to its Web site.

Judging from comments on TorrentFreak, Digg, and TechCrunch, the service seems to have impressed people who have tried it with its speed, usability, and depth of songs (though it's taken dings for sound quality, frequency of commercials, and lack of portability). I haven't had a chance to try it out yet, but as a music fan who got pretty fed up with the repetition of songs on Pandora's artist radio stations over the holiday break, I think this looks very promising.

Currently, potential users have three choices if they want to become a member of Spotify. Day passes, giving users 24-hour access, are available to buy from spotify.com for 99p, while a premium account costs £9.99 per month. Alternatively, current members can send invites to others allowing them to use the service for free.
Update: NME.COM has been given an exclusive link where readers can sign up and experience Spotify for free immediately - just go to Spotify.com/en/get-started to join up.

Wilt u tijdens het werken of surfen naar uw favoriete muziek luisteren? Dan moet u zeker de smartradio Grooveshark eens proberen. Net als bij Deezer, Last.fm en Pandora kunt u hier terecht om duizenden nummers te beluisteren, afspeellijsten aan te maken of nieuwe nummers en artiesten te ontdekken. Grooveshark gaat zelfs nog een stapje verder… U kunt uw eigen mp3’s online opslaan, zodat u ze op elke computer kunt beluisteren.

Als u naar de Grooveshark-website surft, kunt u direct naar uw favoriete muziek luisteren. U hoeft geen account aan te maken, het volstaat om de naam van uw favoriete artiest in te voeren en vervolgens een nummer te kiezen. U kunt een nummer onmiddellijk afspelen of met één druk op de knop toevoegen aan een tracklist. Extra informatie opvragen over het nummer of de artiest kan ook. Bovendien krijgt u bij elk nummer dat u opvraagt een lijst te zien met liedjes van verschillende artiesten in hetzelfde genre. Zo brengt een nummer van Coldplay u bijvoorbeeld ook bij songs van R.E.M., Keane, Snow Patrol en The Fray. Dankzij deze functie kunt u nieuwe artiesten leren kennen. De database is ontzettend uitgebreid en beschikt over artiesten uit uiteenlopende genres.

Omdat u niet hoeft in te loggen om naar een nummer te luisteren, heeft Grooveshark een erg lage instapdrempel. Om persoonlijke afspeellijsten aan te maken én te bewaren – zodat u ze op elke moment en op elke computer kunt opvragen - hebt u wel een (gratis) account nodig. Naast het bewaren van uw favoriete nummers en het opslaan van afspeellijsten, kunt u als geregistreerd gebruiker ook uw muziek uploaden. Hierdoor wordt de database van Grooveshark niet alleen groter, u kunt uw eigen muziek ook op eender welke computer met internetverbinding beluisteren. Het enige wat u moet doen is de Grooveshark Music Uploader downloaden en installeren. Vervolgens kunt u één of meerdere mappen met mp3-bestanden selecteren en uploaden. Enkele ogenblikken later kunt u uw bestanden op de Grooveshark-website vinden, onder de knop My Music.

Earlier this week, the open-source music player built on Mozilla technology, Songbird, finally made its 1.0 release. After being in development for two years, this version feels like the kind of solid media player we've been expecting and hoping for all along. Although nothing is entirely bug-free, this release worked smoothly, with both performance and stability seeming greatly improved. Combine that with its extendibility through the the use of add-ons, and you'll find Songbird has a lot of promise as a worthwhile iTunes replacement.

When we looked at Songbird in the past, many readers were quick to point out the player's sluggish experience, tendency to crash, and bugs. Whatever negative experiences you had before that drove you away from the software, now is the time to get it another shot. This time around, the player felt fast, lightweight, and stable. It imported our iTunes library without a hitch, even the DRM-protected purchases and the accompanying metadata.

As we played tracks, an add-on called mashTape, one of the six default add-ons, let us delve into artist info, discography, links, news, and scroll through flickr photos and YouTube videos. Others that ship with the player out of the box include Last.fm, Concerts, and SHOUTcast radio.  With these installed, you can sync your tracks to Last.fm's online service, check out upcoming concerts in the area, and stream music over the internet using the player.

In addition, there are over 70 add-ons available for download from the Songbird site, including the recommended add-ons like LyricMaster, which puts the lyrics to your favorite tunes in the Songbird sidebar and MediaFlow which introduces a visually appealing cover flow view of your music. Songbird is based on Mozilla's Gecko engine, the same engine that powers Firefox. And like Firefox, Songbird also allows for tabbed browsing and themes, as well as the above-mentioned add-ons. The customization and extendibility Songbird provides are really what make the software so compelling.

What Songbird delivers is something Apple can't: a more open version of iTunes that runs on PC, Mac, and Linux machines. Apple's locked-down and closed iTunes player lets Songbird comfortably find its niche as the open, alternative music player, much as Firefox became the alternative web browser.  If the company ever reaches the point where it can match every one of iTunes features and provide the customization aspect, the decision to switch will become a no-brainer. Why have less when you can have more?