The Best Streaming Music Services – The Geek Girl Report

I don't know about you, but I've got to have some music going when I work on my computer. Usually, I'll just open up iTunes on my home computer or grab my MP3 player and get to work. But what if you're at work and you can't use iTunes or your portable devices? That's where streaming music services come in. Take a look at some of the most popular streaming music services on the Internet today.

Spotify

Probably the most well-known of the streaming music services, Spotify offers a library of over 15 million songs, in addition to letting you play your own songs from your hard drive. And thanks to its partnership with Facebook, you'll be able to see what your friends are listening to on Spotify and listen along with them. I use Spotify, and I've found some pretty good tracks just by checking out what my friends are listening to on Facebook.

Pandora

Committed to "playing only music you love," Pandora allows you to create your own radio station on the Internet. All you do is enter in an artist, genre or song, and Pandora's "Music Genome Project" engine hunts down other songs you might like based on your suggestions. You can have as many as 100 different radio stations, so you can create a station for as many different genres as you like.

Grooveshark

Grooveshark is a unique little service in that you can easily search through a massive library of user-uploaded songs. You can also create a playlist and start listening right away without having to sign up for a subscription. (however, if you want to save your playlist, it will require a subscription fee) Grooveshark is also available in App form on your smartphone, though the quality of the App is reportedly a bit questionable...

Rdio

Rdio (pronounced ar-dee-o) can best be described as streaming music meets social media. Rdio lets you see what everyone else is listening to in real time, from your best friend to your favorite artist. You can then create a playlist based on what everyone else is listening to,a nd can even publishes your playlist on Twitter, if you like. Spotify may have jumped onto the music-meets-social-media bandwagon, but Rdio was the first, and arguably, still the best at what it does.

Last.fm

Last.fm bills itself as a "music suggestion service," and it does a pretty good job with it. Last.fm uses "The Scrobbler," which tracks which songs you're listening to, how often you listen to them, what kinds of songs you listen to, and other such information. And using that information, it introduces you to new music you might like based on the information the Scobbler gathers up. It's a more scientific approach to what Pandora's "Music Genome Project" does, and it works surprisingly well.