Thesixtyone.com is my new preference for listening to music over Grooveshark. While I do love using Grooveshark and being able to have the ability to check out pretty much any song I ever could imagine and then being able to save those songs on to a playlist, I rarely use Grooveshark to break out from my typical music and find new stuff. This is where thesixtyone comes into play.

Being sick of the same old stuff, I discovered thesixtyone and started on my musical adventure. The interface of the site just recently changed, so I still am getting used to it, but it is actually pretty fun to use. All you really need when you are using this website is the album or the band, and then you have a few menus that pull out when you hover over areas that allow you to navigate. These toolbars allow you to skip the song, save the song to a playlist, “heart” the song, and more. There are a few things about this interface that I do not enjoy, such as how last time you could simply “save” songs while now you have to save them to playlists that have a maximum capacity of 10 songs. Another odd thing about this interface is that you cannot look at a list of songs to chose from; while you can search for a particular artist, you cannot see a list of the top X songs or so and choose from there.

The cool thing about thesixtyone is that it is a place for new artists, and then it is the listeners who decide what’s good. The more hearts and saves a song gets, the more popular it becomes, and the more well known the artist becomes. They claim to be “nurturing a growing ecosystem where talented folks can sell songs and merchandise directly to their fans.” On thesixtyone artists can make at least $7 per album and are paid every 30 days– that’s  a lot of money in comparison to the standard $1-2 per album.

They’re named after Highway 61– “The road by which people left their homes to take their music to the world.”

When it comes to keeping up with what is new and fresh in music, I find the radio is not the only place you can use.  You need to have reliable sources that can give you the best scoop on what to listen to.  I’m going to list some of my ideas and let you decide for yourself.

First, your public library is a good start.  Going through their music to find new albums, or just stuff that is new to you, is a great place to discover things.  You can skim a few magazines like Rolling Stone or Spin, but if you can get a hold of Paste, or other independent magazines you’ll get a better sampling of music.

I mentioned radio, which isn’t always bad, they just frontload a lot of over-hyped junk at times.  Try NPR online. You may not like talk radio, however, they do showcase a lot of up and coming bands that would otherwise not get any other radio play.

Find a critic that shares the same taste in music as you and keep up with what they review.  Even music blogs aren’t bad, but you have to be careful of heavy bias.  I like using Allmusic.com to get information about a band and see what influenced them.  The site is pretty easy to navigate and easy to get lost in for hours.

Finally, a local record store is a good place also.  I always give album advice to people when I go out: yes, I am that guy.  While you’re there pick up a compilation to hear some new stuff you might not have found before.  I stay away from tribute albums, since I want original material.

I hope this helps, and if you have suggestions, let me know.

At Grooveshark.com, you can listen to all of your favorite artists for free. I’m not talking about 30 second clips or low quality files; at Grooveshark, you get access to millions of full-length, high quality tunes.

One of my favorite features about Grooveshark is that it allows you to quickly create a playlist. You simply search for the track titles or artists that you like, select the names, and they pop into your playlist. You can drag the songs, conveniently displayed by their album covers, to different spots on the playlist, or you can choose to have them be “shuffled” as they’re played. If you don’t want a song to be played, you simply can delete it, or if you want to start from scratch, you can do that as well. Once you come up with a playlist you love, if you create a free account, you can save the playlist and make another one.

Another great feature is the Grooveshark Radio. The Grooveshark Radio looks at your preferences and selects new songs to add to your playlist that the program thinks you might enjoy. If you especially like the song, you can mark it with a smiley face, or if you don’t like it, you can ex it out and it’ll find something new for you. I like the Grooveshark Radio, because one easily can add in a song choice while continuously allowing the radio to make more suggestions.

Grooveshark also has a list of popular songs, so if you’re absolutely too lazy to make your own playlist, you can use a previously made one. Sometimes, I like to simply search for an artist that I like, then I select “Play All”, which causes every song by the artist to jump onto my playlist.

I’ve never used a program for listening to music that is easier than Grooveshark. There hasn’t been a song that I have searched for that Grooveshark hasn’t had. The layout is fantastic, and you even can choose your own themes. If you haven’t yet seen it, I’d definitely recommend that you try Grooveshark today!

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Make sure you take good care of your music.

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Have you checked out Prince’s new website? It has been up for some time now, but it was launched officially on March 24th. The site gives fans access to his new albums, concert tickets, live performances, music videos and images, and a lot of other things that has not been given out to Prince’s fans until now. When you’re on the site and you have the bucks to spare for the website membership, you’ll be granted access to to Prince’s three new albums, Lotusflow3r, MPLSoUND and Elixir, an album by Bria Valente, Prince’s protegée.

To help make a buzz about the launch of his new site, Prince has performed in three venues with three different bands, on March 24 in Los Angeles, and on March 25 in The Tonight Show.

I liked Prince’s music in the past, especially those that were written during his Purple Rain days, but he somehow got lost in my list through time. Now he comes to my attention again with Lotusflow3r. I have checked out the site and sampled three songs, one from each album, ”Chocolate Box”, “Colonized Mind”, “All This Love”. Well, it seems that Prince knows that his golden years were those during the Purple Rain era; he’s trying to bring us back to those years with Lotusflow3r. The three songs are replete with the echoes of the past, the echoes of the 80s. I am not saying that the style he has now is outdated, it has a flavor of its own that most Prince fans could relish.

The new albums also show us (at least in the three songs I’ve sampled) what were not given much emphasis in the past– that Prince is a skilled guitarist.  Musicians would have lots to figure out in the guitar work in this album, things that could help spice up their own playing.

As to his  protegée, Bria Valente, well, she’s got potential, that’s the farthest I can say as of now. I need to listen more songs from the third album to be able to have more to say about her.

Pandora: radio from the Music Genome Project. Pandora is an awesome site that allows you to create your own radio station for free! All you have to do is pick some artists that you love the most and then create a station. Then, because of all of the Music Genome Project’s hard work, only songs that are alike in genre to your artists will be played. That way, you only have to listen to the music that you want to hear. You’ll hear songs that you know and songs that you don’t know, and you’ll soon find new favorites. Pandora will quickly scan all of its music collection (which is HUGE) to find songs with interesting musical similarities to your choice. In the mood for various types of music? Well, you always can create more than one station.

Now I know that there are plenty of sites like this one such as Last.fm, but Pandora is definitely one of my favorites. It is simple to use, and it’s nice to hear the music genres of my choice. Best of all, it’s an online service, so wherever I go, my music will be there right with me!

Pandora works extremely hard to play the music you’ll love and nothing else. They’ve been hard at work on the Music Genome Project. What is it? As Pandora would say it, “It is the most comprehensive analysis of music ever undertaken.” To accomplish this task, music analysts listen to music and study hundreds of musical details about every single song. They say that it takes them 20-30 minutes per song to do this!

Pandora is going through all of this work to make sure that you have the best musical experience. So appreciate it, and join today!