M. Appelman

Some of us must have done something bad last year, because Santa shut down Rdio right before Xmas. It was one of the better music services with a clean design and amazing comunity with whom I discovered and shared so many great tunes with.

After Rdio shut down a lot of people went with the obvious choices: Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, etc. I played around with them for a bit but non did it for me. So I decided to go with some other options. Note: my listening habbit is probably a tad different than the average person. I don’t care much for Top 40 music and tend to focus on “electronic” music. I mostly listen to music via my notebook speakers or headphones.

Direct

• BandCamp. Pretty much every artist or label that I like has a page on this platform. You can often listen to full albums before they are even officially released. And their Weekly Show is absolutely killer!

• SoundCloud. If one of my favorite artist or labels is not on Bandcamp, they are most likely to be found on SoundCloud. Both platforms will notify you when new releases are out.

Podcasts

• Bleep. Great independent online music store with a very diverse podcast.
• XLR8R. Used to be an actual magazine, now purely a web platform with artist interviews, reviews and of course a podcast.
• Solid Steel. Started as a radio show in the late 80s! I remember getting copies of shows burned on CDs from friends.
• Ninja Tune. Record label that occasionaly puts out podcasts with artists interviews including a selection of new releases.
• Boiler Room. Live music shows which sometimes get turned into podcasts.
• Stones Throw. Killer record label from LA.
• Turntable Lab. A record store for DJs.
• Gilles Peterson. This legendary radio DJ has some of the best guests on his show.
• Low End Theory. A club night named after one of Tribe’s best albums gets my automatic podcast subscription!
• Phonica Records. Music shop out of London.
• Resident Advisor. This amount of content that this site has to offer is overwhelming, so I just focus on their podcast.

Streams

• dublab. Mostly replays of past shows, but keep their twitter account in check for live shows announcements.
• SomaFM. The default for background tunes. The cliqhop idm station is my favorite.
• Eclectic 24. It’s pretty much KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic (sans Jason Bentley) and it’s really solid.
• Red Light Radio. A Dutch station that broadcasts (in English) from a tiny studio in the famous Red Light District in Amsterdam. Parra occasionaly has a show on it.
• East Village Radio. My friend Arlie told me about this NYC station before I even had Rdio. They dissapeared for a while but are back on some new independent radio platform called Dash Radio.

Handy Utils

• Overcast. The best iOS podcast app. Key feature: listen to podcasts on your iPhone and continue listening where you left off on your desktop (and vice versa).
• Streamkeys. Excellent Chrome extension to use your keyboard to control music from a wide variety of music platforms.
• last.fm Scrobbler. Another Chrome extension that scrobbles tunes from a huge selection of platforms to last.fm.

Conclusion

I could go on and on, but what it comes down to is that, there’s just too much amazing free music to lock myself in any paid subscription services.