Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Luckily internet services abound for discovering, trying, and buying new music. Unfortunately, your choices can be a little overwhelming, not all tools fit your needs, and few of them actually integrate with one another. Here's how to work new music into your life in a post-MP3 age, from discovering it to integrating it into your library."

Discovering new music and artists is one of the real joys of life. If you're like me, you may get frustrated from time to time when you hear a song while driving, working, or otherwise focusing on an activity that is not the music itself and wonder who the artist is and what the name of the song is. Often, before you figure it out, it's gone. You may also be spending some time exploring music on the web or on conventional radio or satellite radio, and find that it's a tedious, non-scientific, endeavor. Fortunately, with a little planning and experience, you can leverage all kinds of music resources, tools, and repositories, and experience that wonderful feeling of finding a great song. Lifehacker has put together a three-step process for effectively exploring the world for music using present-day options: discovering music you like, on-demand streaming, and buying. If music is a big part of your life, read this posting and take advantage of the options available to us these days.

"Having to sync all your music between devices is annoying. Luckily a number of cloud music services allow you to stream your music to nearly everything—laptops, tablets, smartphones—with minimal effort or tech know-how. Each has its strengths and weaknesses, depending on your needs; here's how to figure out which one's best for you."

Lifehacker takes a good look at the various cloud music services out there, and has a pretty balanced write-up on each of them. I do wonder, with data plans becoming more restricted in the US, and with most of the services aimed at the US market, would anyone really want to stream their music to their phones instead of just storing it on them?