abandoning iTunes, finding new music sources

One day at work, our IT department told us all that we could no longer use any third party applications on our computers without explicit approval. This included iTunes. When I heard this, I panicked, I got bitter, I thought about leading a revolt, but in the end I hesitantly uninstalled my sole means of computer-work-environment survival, iTunes. As difficult as it was, uninstalling iTunes opened up a whole new world of musical discovery for me.

I used Pandora when I was lazy, Last.fm too.  I fell in love with The Hype Machine, which lets people listen to the music people are blogging about. My other favorite listening method was to subscribe to a podcast´s RSS feed in Google Reader and then stream the mp3s from there. When there was a specific full-length song I was looking for, somehow YouTube was (strangely) almost always the easiest way to find it.  All these ways of streaming music allowed me to continue listening to music without iTunes. And what I first looked at as a hindrance became a new channel to musical discovery.

Today I wanted to share a source I just came across, which is NPR´s podcast of free live concerts.  In my opinion, this is a gold mine.  Have a look at the list of concerts you can stream or download and you are sure to find an artist you like.  For me, I´m going to be listening to the hour-and-a-half Neko Case concert, and watching the Rodrigo y Gabriela video, and Dan Deacon, and Radiohead, and The Avett Brothers, or Doc Watson.



UPDATE ... January 11, 2010.  Pandora will not work from a Peru IP address, and the last.fm website appears to no longer be free, so I´m back to loving The Hype Machine for my music streaming.