songza

Slacker Radio (free) This is a great option for listening to streaming radio, with an intuitive interface that makes it easy to find what you want quickly. To use Slacker you must sign up for an account or log in with your Facebook credentials.

You can search for artists using a field at the top; check out the Music Guide curated by Slacker; or search by genres, stations you've previously listened to, specialty stations, or news, talk, and sports stations. Each selection on the first screen leads to another list where you can swipe to browse selections to find … Read more

Editors' note This review has been updated with new features added in version 3.0.

Songza is a popular streaming-music app that offers a different take on the type of programmed radio experience that Pandora initially made popular. Rather than generate playlists based on specific songs or artists, this app tries to offer up the right selection of tunes for specific activities you might be engaged in. In version 3.0, new features make the app less cluttered and help you start listening to music faster and with fewer steps.

While other streaming-radio apps typically start you off with a … Read more

Good news: Google says so long to the "Search" button, Mozilla launching an online gaming directory, and a jailed journalist Twitters from his cell. Bad news: Snakebots climb trees! And Twitter has dedicated servers for, gulp, Justin Bieber. Special guest Darren Kitchen joins us.

Three years after launching the first DRM-free music download store, Amazon.com is once again stepping up its music game.

On Wednesday morning, subscribers to the indie-music download service Amie Street received an e-mail announcing that the company had been bought by Amazon. Existing customers get a $5 gift certificate to Amazon's MP3 store and must download all the music they've paid for by September 22.

Amie Street started by offering music from independent labels and digital distributors like The Orchard, and it was a pioneer of demand-based pricing--all downloads on the site started off being available for … Read more

Pandora's model of determining what you might like to listen to with an algorithm is being challenged by companies like Slacker, who use human music experts to build and fine-tune playlists. Songza Sets is another company that is trying to combine the human touch with an on-demand, streaming distribution model. Songza Sets presents daily, hand-picked, 12-song playlists that follow a certain theme. The result is a thoroughly enjoyable listening experience that lets users discover great new music.

The themes for Songza Sets are fairly creative to this point. For example, one set is made up of indie songs that … Read more

Got a song stuck in your head? Get a quick fix with Songerize, a super simple Google-esque search engine for popular audio tracks. Just type in the song name and artist, and within seconds it'll start playing right under the results. It's powered by SeeqPod, which offers a more robust feature set, but without as much simplicity. Songerize doesn't tell you where the tracks are from or where to get them, but in testing it managed to pick up nearly every mainstream artist and popular hit I stuck in.

Another service that has been doing this with … Read more

Songza is a new music search engine and player. It's got the cleanest interface to a music library that I've ever seen, and it's great fun to use. It is limited, though.

To play music on Songza, you just type in the band or the song name, and a list of results pops up. From the list you can play tunes directly, or queue them to your playlist. You can also share the track, either by e-mail or with HTML code you can embed on your own Web page.

All of Songza's music comes from the … Read more