Do you like music? Me too. So, I feel inclined to share some impressive new(ish) music services that are doing a lot to change the game and provide new, exciting ways for us to enjoy something that makes us inherently happy. Thus, I’ve compiled some current favorites for streaming ‘radio’, discovery, and on-demand. Each one offers something fresh and different, and not one of them will cost you a dime. What do you have to lose? Give them a look and let me know what your favorites are.

STREAMING RADIO

Songza

In the very crowded space that is streaming radio, Songza manages to differentiate themselves by creating a tailored experience dished out by Musicologists, Critics, Musicians, and DJ’s via their ‘Music Concierge’. Referencing the time of day that you open the app, it makes suggestions for the types of playlists that you might like. For instance, if it’s Thursday afternoon, you might get suggestions for getting fired up, college life, or working to a beat, among others. Let’s say you’re studying for finals and need something other than coffee to keep your head up. Once you progress one step further down the rabbit hole by selecting the college varietal, you’re prompted to pick from a list of ‘styles’ within the master selection, including strutting to class, making chill new friends, or studying for finals. Then you get to select an individual playlist that satisfies your criteria, while being able to provide feedback and skip a lot more songs than most free services allow within a given hour.

Behind the concierge feature, users can peruse Popular playlists (trending, featured, and all time favorites), save their favorites for easy access, and go on an exploratory mission via genre, activity, mood, decade, culture, and ‘Record Store Clerk’, which provides industry expert-generated (and coyly named) playlists for those of us who just can’t seem to make up our minds.

Honorable mentions: Pandora and Slacker Radio

DISCOVERY

Soundwave

A relative newcomer onto the scene, Soundwave has done something that no other service has been able to do: Track music via iOS apps (read: iTunes) via Facebook Scrobbling. That’s right, Soundwave has found a way to make the Apple music player social in a way that should make services like Last.FM very uncomfortable AND get approved by the App Store. The highly anticipated service has received accolades from numerous industry experts and the tech-aware, even receiving a major shout out from Steve Wozniak for their innovative approach. Taking the social nature of music a step further, users can select a ‘Humdinger’, or favorite track, to promote and share. The ‘Music Map’ feature allows people to see what those nearby (on a map view where you can literally draw a circle with your finger to define an area) are listening to, and subsequently listen to their Humdingers as well. Add to that the fact that it’s free AND ad-free, and you’ve got a truly unique, utterly revolutionary music service that can connect you with the world at a moment’s notice.

To recap, it pulls in songs from other apps like Spotify, Rdio, Deezer, Youtube, and 8Tracks as well as having the unique ability to integrate directly with your iOS music player. It’ll be a hard-fought battle for subscribers, but I like Soundwave’s chances…

Honorable mentions: TheSixtyOne, Bloom.FM, and Soundcloud

ON-DEMAND

Myspace Music

I’m sure a lot of you were expecting either Spotify or Rdio, but Myspace truly has taken it a step further. With by far the largest music archive of nearly 47MM songs (twice Spotify’s catalogue), an ultra-intuitive UI using a unique, side-scrolling technique that seamlessly blends articles, videos, and music, and all of the integrations that you would require from a music community, Justin Timberlake’s venture has provided a true rebirth for the long-abhorred service. This review isn’t intended to focus on the social network aspect of the site, but rather the unique tactics used to connect listeners to artists and the beautiful ecosystem in which the interaction occurs. Where services like Spotify and Rdio serve up simple on-demand songs, they don’t make you feel at all connected to the bands that generated the tracks, nor news about them. About 25MM of Myspace’s songs stem from independent artists, and they are interspersed amongst larger acts via the ‘radio’ section alongside a visual representation of the ‘mix’ of each station.

The site provides a bunch of nice-to-have features including omni-present search, user-generated playlists, differently weighted objects by popularity (those of you who are Pinterest users might find some similarities), and users can create compound mixes comprised of music, videos, and images.

Honorable mentions: Mog, Spotify, and Rdio