Poll: What online music service do you use most frequently?

I see very distinct music activities:

- Discovering new music (Hype Machine, Sound Cloud)

- Recommending music to friends (Last.fm, sending a YouTube link to a friend, etc.)

- Active listening (building a playlist on Spotify or Rdio or Rhapsody; buying/pirating music and manually managing it in iTunes, Goole Music, Amazon CloudPlayer, etc.)

- Passive listening (Pandora, Turntable)

Some services blur the lines between these activities, but I don't think any make a serious attempt to satisfy more than two of these use-cases (and probably with good reasons). As a result, I think many folks use more than one service.

Consequently, what I'm more interested in is why you use the services you use. What makes you boot up Spotify one morning and Pandora the next? Do your activities seem to fall into the buckets I described, or are my assumptions completely off? And if my assumptions are somewhat accurate, what percentage of your time do you spend on each type of activity?

For streaming music, YouTube playlists and http://www.di.fm/ are my favorites for convenience. It's nice to have the tracks sequenced by actual DJs in mixes if I want to hear a lot of new stuff. Di.fm is the only streaming service I have actually payed for before, they have a good iPhone app as well.

I also use Last.fm, but only for passive scrobbling and not listening.

Youtube should definitely be on this list, it has an insane amount of material compared to every other catalog, there are even plenty of out of print Vinyl rips being uploaded.

I use Grooveshark when I know what I want to listen to, otherwise there is a great service called The Hype Machine at hypem.com which is an excellent source of new and upcoming electronic/rap/dance/indie music

Not strictly a service, but perhaps "torrents" should be an option? I know of a few people who either buy or torrent everything.

I use Last.fm simply because it's completely free over here in the US, doesn't play ads after the first initial ad and doesn't have time restrictions like Pandora's 72 or something hour limit. I've been messing around with Spotify but I'm simply too lazy to make play lists for the wide range of music I enjoy. Much easier to just think "I feel like Heavy Metal today" and play a Heavy Metal premade station.

Voted other: Soundcloud, but I'm probably something of an outlier. Other than that its mostly podcasts/radio/purchased music, with a tiny bit of spotify.

I'm using Google Music Beta, primarily because it's free (for now), but also because they sent me a Cr48 and my first question when I got a Google Support Ninja on the phone (had to deal with a 3G problem) was about the best music app. They didn't have one at the time (he suggested lots of Google Ninjas use Grooveshark), but now they do, so I'm beta testing that as well.

My biggest problems with it:

- Frequently loses the 'play' button - the bottom control bar disappears after a while of leaving the tab open.

- No play counts in several of the views (album, for instance).

- No scrobbling - but there's a great Chrome extension called Better Music Beta which does it for you.

- No nested playlists or smart playlists.

- Uploading needs a lot of work - after uploading my entire library, I realized that a lot of the genre metadata was wrong, so I changed it in iTunes. The music uploader then started re-uploading a few thousand songs...

Things I like:

- It has all of my music!

- It's currently free...

- It sync'd my iTunes playlists (the non-smart ones anyway).

- It's good quality playback, and I've never had a display or playback problem that a page refresh didn't fix.

I'm a bit old fashioned, I guess: if I'm not looking to use Grooveshark to listen to something specific, I find that you can't replace a good DJ playing a good mix of music.

I've found more great music listening to WFMU (http://www.wfmu.org/) than anywhere else. It's a fantastic freeform station that has something everyone can love.

Other: mp3 blogs and forums. I like to discover new music by reading something about it first, preferably from writers whose taste I like. When a description sounds intriguing, then I'll download and listen. That also fills me in on cultural and musical knowledge along the way, since they usually provide some context on how the album being discussed fits into its genre, predecessors/successors, etc. (basically, why they posted it, and why I should care about it).

I've discovered some interesting stuff via Last.fm as well, but somehow the streaming-tracks approach doesn't do it for me. It might be in part that I prefer albums to singles, and in part that the cultural context is interesting to me. So algorithmic recommendation feels disembodied on both counts: random songs separated from their album, streamed at me in a jumble with no explanation.

Mixcloud ( http://www.mixcloud.com ), which I am suprised is not on the list.

After that, youtube and a bit of grooveshark.

And I have not used spotify since their removal of "spotify free" accounts.

Grooveshark, since it's completely free and it works in Argentina.

thesixtyone to listen and eMusic to buy. I have a last.fm account but hardly ever use it, and tried spotify a couple of times but see no value to it.

In roughly this order, and none of them all that frequently.

Youtube

iheartradio

Soundcloud

Used to be iTunes but I don't use that anymore, and deeply regret every file imported into that piece of junk software. I may start using amazon mp3. The truth is despite being a musician (or maybe because of it) I am not an avaricious consumer of music. Recently I downloaded a bunch of music from the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum website and that's lasted me months.

I buy a lot of (physical medium) music, so I don't need to pay for a music service and I have a collection of music on my hard drive that I want to listen to. Because of this, I use Google Music a lot, especially considering they have a good mobile app for my phone.

Grooveshark has become a distant second since I got my Google Music invite, and I used Last.fm before I found out about Grooveshark.

Spotify! Although I'm always disappointed by their mobile apps, it's still the easiest and quickest way to create and listen to playlists. Their library is large enough for me, with only a few (5-6) artists I'm missing. But now that you can add local files, that's not a problem anymore.

I wrote a simple desktop client in C# .net that minimizes to tray and can be controlled with global shortcuts and haven't used ANY other audioplayer since.

Edit: its available here: http://www.missingstatement.com/groovesharp

Surprised no one mentioned iTunes. I probably spend way too much money on iTunes on albums every month.

Surprised by the lack of rdio responses.

Most of my twenty-something friends in SF and NY prefer rdio over spotify.

How about www.naveg.as (Navegas). It´s my music baby as a alpha which lets you play your music on your hard drive - OFFLINE music - together with YouTube and SoundCloud - ONLINE music. More sources and services to come!

Pandora of those you listed, but mostly Subsonic on my own server. With an Android client and acceptable quality over 3G, works the best for me.

I use Spotify when I know what I want to listen to and http://thesixtyone.com when I don't.

I thought last.fm would be on the top! They are great, no adds, even in the free desktop version, skip as you wish, what else do you need?

Add turtable.fm on there! I've spent more time on there then any other music service as of recent (and I pay for pandora).

A bit sad that Zune was omitted. The Zune pass is a fantastic offering of all-you-can-eat music for 15 bucks a month.

I love radio. But Spotify is good too. It has some good collection of both classical music and foreign music.

Other: The Hype Machine (hypem.com)

http://www.ReverbNation.com :)

Jamendo.com and many netlabels.

4 years ago I decided not to support the music industry anymore.

There are also Deezer and MusicMe which are pretty popular in France.

What about Rhapsody?

Rdio all the way. Best $10 I spend every month.

Added options: Youtube, Turntable.fm and Itunes

web streaming from real live radio stations

My self hosted instance of Subsonic.

Shuffler.fm, hypem.com and ext.fm

eMusic, mostly because I have a pretty good annual plan that was grandfathered in.

Also, the Live Music Archive.

Add SoundCloud; pls & thx

Where is Amazon MP3?

Amazon Cloud Player

Grooveshark. win.

+1 Turntable.fm

I love rdio.

Official.fm

Grooveshark