Battle for your ears

With all of the different ways to listen to music these days, it's hard to choose which methods match your listening style. As of 2010, there are over 20 popular sites dedicated to a user's musical fulfillment. Whether you're interested in discovering new music or simply listening to your favorites, the Internet has provided outlets so that you can do so commercial free.

Pandora.com is an automated music recommendation service founded by the Music Genome Project. According to the project's message, their goal is to "capture the essence of music at the fundamental level." The user-friendly interface asks the guest to type in a song or artist they like and will evaluate the different attributes of the track in order to estimate what the user would like to hear next. Pandora considers over 2,000 factors that will determine which song is played next. These factors include tempo, vocal harmonies and instrumental precision.

By allowing the user to approve or reject the website's selections, Pandora is a great tool for hearing both the songs and artists you like. The user can create multiple radio stations that vary depending on their mood. Although Pandora has over 700,000 tracks in its library and over 48 million users, Pandora Radio is laden with commercials and requires a monthly fee to play without them.

Last.fm is an Internet radio site that was founded in the UK in 2002. The site has a unique feature called an "audio scribbler" that builds a detailed profile of the user's musical taste by recording information from the user's selections. The songs are recorded from the user's computer, portable devices and songs listened to online.

The information is transferred to Last.fm and then creates a user profile. Other users can discover this profile and send friend requests to those with similar tastes. Most of the tracks offered on Last.fm can be accessed to for free.

Grooveshark.com, though newer than the previous two websites, has a large following. This website has had a legal battle with whether its features should all be free. Unique to this site, the user can skip forward or backwards in a song and allows users to follow one another, similar to the members of Twitter.  Grooveshark is good for discovering new music through its radio feature. The user can "like" or "dislike" songs to build a playlist, like they could on Pandora. This feature plays songs and queues them instantly. This site also allows the user to skip as many songs as they would like, and allows for the user to save songs as favorites.