Ok, well Spotify isn’t exactly dead, but free music isn’t really free any more if you have to pay for it. The free service will be capped at 10 hours of music a month, and each track will be restricted to 5 plays (which is, to be fair, more than enough plays to realize that Bowling for Soup are bad enough to make my ears bleed). I still use Spotify, but I did have to look for some alternatives. So here they are, the Spotify replacements (or maybe Spotify alternatives):

Musicovery http://musicovery.com/

Apparently lots of Spotify users use it to find new music. Sure, the related artists feature is good but Spotify was always terrible with genres or ‘moods’. Musicovery is my favourite choice for background music, and surprisingly good for music discovery. Its largely the same as Last.fm but allows you choose from a matrix of moods. Not really an alternative to Spotify if you want to listen to particular songs and you can’t make playlists. You can, however, give each song you listen to a ‘heart’ or a ‘broken heart’ to indicate whether you liked the song or not, much like Last.fm.

Grooveshark, http://listen.grooveshark.com

Much more of a Spotify replacement, Grooveshark is basically an online, browser based version of Spotify. It doesn’t seem as well polished, however, and songs are often duplicated and sometimes badly tagged. On the plus side, you can search for songs, albums and artists and pretty much play what you like. Playlists are included and, like Spotify, there’s also a radio function. Has a lot of music, although I’m pretty confident its not all legal, since they’ve only got EMI on board, and left out Sony, Universal and Warner, which does account for a shit tonne of music.

The Sixty One, http://www.thesixtyone.com

With a name like ‘The Sixty One’ I knew that this website was going to be cool and edgy but largely irrelevant and useless. Partially proven wrong, I liked the design of the website, even if you have almost no choice in music.

EDIT:

After some time getting to know ‘thesixtyone’ (its far cooler if its all one word), I think it might be one of my favourite websites..

And then there’s:

• Deezer (http://www.deezer.com/) which is a lot like Grooveshark, maybe better. It has a nice user interface, and some Pink Floyd, which is a plus.
• Jamendo (http://www.jamendo.com/) which offers a whole load of free (open-source-ish) music. Personally, although its a nice idea, most of the music I’ve heard on it is shit. That, and the fact that the interface isn’t friendly with the pop-up music player.
• Libre.fm (http://libre.fm/) is pretty much Last.fm, still in English despite the confusing name, and is puportedly 100% Indie, whatever that means. I didn’t try it out because you had to sign up.

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