Songs and Music

Track Down Your Track

Pick a song, any song. If we don't have it, we'll search the web for you to find it and play it. While you're listening, you can rate it and leave a comment to show the world what you really think.
If we can't find your song now, try again later and you may get lucky — the web's mysterious like that.


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Sellaband/SlicethePie

Paradoxically, as more people seem to be investing time rather than money to acquire music, a growing number of fans are ponying up cold hard cash to invest in bands themselves.

Once they reach a certain level of fan investment, bands on Sellaband and SlicethePie get to use a pool of their inverstors' money ranging from $30,000 to $50,000 to record and market an album. Not only do investors get a copy of that album, but they see a return on album sales and can trade shares in bands as they would a company's stock.

Sellaband was the first company to pioneer this approach, but we're including SlicethePie here too, since the companies employ slightly different approaches.

TuneCore

If you've ever tried to puzzle your way through iTunes' music submission process, you know how labyrinthine and tedious it can be. Now, multiply that hassle by the number of digital music outlets in the world, and you start to see why TuneCore is so important.

In case you haven't heard of it, TuneCore allows anyone to distribute songs or albums to iTunes, Amazon, Rhapsody, eMusic and so on, for preposterously low fees. None other than Trent Reznor used TuneCore to distribute his 36-song opus Ghosts I-IV to iTunes, Amazon, Rhapsody and other outlets for a mere $38.

This company is a true Long Tail enabler, and TuneCore's latest move could make it even more disruptive. The company recently released an API that gives anyone the ability to distribute other peoples' music digitally, worldwide (with permission, of course).

Whatever the next version of the record label is, it's probably going to require a distributor that looks a lot like TuneCore.

YouTube

This is another sort of counterintuitive choice. Isn't YouTube a video site? Guess again, says a certain digital music insider, who once said to me, "Want to see the best on-demand music service in the world? Go to YouTube and close your eyes." He was right.

Thanks to licensing deals with the labels, hordes of loyal users scouring the dustbins of history for every last scrap of available footage, and a generous embedding policy, no list of the best music sites in the world would be complete without YouTube.