10 Free Alternatives to Last.fm’s Radio Service
Now since the Last.fm radio is getting paid for users living outside US, UK and Germany, it becomes quite a pain for the left out users to look for a free equivalent, if not a better alternative to Last.fm’s radio.
Although Last.fm still functions as a recommendation tool, as you can still scrobble your tracks (for free), you won’t be able to listen to the recommended tracks without buying a subscription. To ease out the task for you, we researched a little bit and have put down a list of 10 free alternatives to the Last.fm Radio service.
StumbleAudio
StumbleAudio is like StumbleUpon, but for music. You can randomly listen to music and rate them ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’. You can browse music by channels and save favorites when you sign up.
Spotify
If you live in Europe, you need not look further. Spotify is a radio, a recommendation tool, a music sharing tool and a lot more. It comes with its own desktop app from where you can stream the music you like. Not available in the rest of the world yet.
SHOUTcast
Shoutcast is one of the oldest and most popular radio services on the internet. Browse by artist or genre and make advanced searches. Thousands of radio channels add to its glory.
Musicovery
Musicovery is an interactive and intuitive radio service which adjusts itself according to your mood. You can also choose music from genre, timeframe and browse their hit songs.
Deezer
With Deezer, you can listen to all kinds of music from rock to hip-hop, jazz, electro and world music. You can browse their top charts and listen to the radios.
iLike
Quite much like Last.fm, iLike integrates a sidebar to your iTunes from where it can track your listening habits and then provide music suggestions. You can play their radio by genre or artist. They also have added features like concert listings and free mp3 downloads for some songs. When you play music there, you can also see the youtube video for that song alongside.
Tunerec
Tunerec is a web based service, that records’ songs off internet radio streams and then tags them all for your convenience. You can search songs by artist, album or song name. It has got a very sleek interface, though it takes some time to record songs for you.
Songza
With Songza, you can search, share and create playlists easily. You can listen to playlists others have made and discover new music. When you play a track, you can also glance through its video alongside.
Live365
With Live365, you can search for more than 6000 online radio stations. You can browse as per genre or you can see which radio station is playing a particular song you want to hear. In all, a great package.
RadioBeta
RadioBeta lets you search for radio stations by geography or genres. You can play radio stations from RadioBeta itself and also queue them for playing. With the geo search feature, you can listen online radio in your regional language. Works quite well!
Update: We would also like to add RadioTime to the list. Apart from listening to various online radio channels there, you can also lend an ear for a talk show or news channel.
This finishes the list. Let us know what you think of Last’s decision to cut off free radio, and, of course, these alternatives.
Author: Keshav Khera
Keshav Khera is a young freelance writer from India. Alongside writing for the web, he also attends school and tries not to bunk classes. He keeps interest in music, table tennis, reading and of course, twitter (@keshav)Keshav Khera has written 111 articles for us.
The author of this post can be contacted at keshav@techie-buzz.comComment Using Facebook
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In Latin America there is also SonidoLocal.com (http://www.sonidolocal.com)
no I dont think so
365 user, it’s just great
I’ve bookmarked this page ‘coz I’ll be reading this again and again. Thank you for the useful tip on links!
ummmmm…how about the two best services out there?
Pandora
Grooveshark
Nice collection, thanks for sharing
do you know is some of this services are are active from italy?
I’ll try them!!! Thanks!
Thanks for sharing, It’s Nice collection.
Stumble upon features a lot of good song selections. It’s for those with distinctive song tastes.
Great. I’m glad there are some good alternatives to LastFM. PS: stumbled because it deserve it
Pandora it’s not accessibile outside USA , maybe one the best service is ILike,you can use it even in facebook
Thanks for this nice information.
Sorry—I guess Italy is “outside” Europe—SPOTIFY doesn’t work here!
Spotify’s great, but only works in some countries inside Europe. The UK, France and Germany are part of the lucky ones, here in Belgium we’re less fortunate. So I guess thank you proxyservers is in order.. =)
there is one caled imeem aswell, i dont know if you can get it online but i have the app for this on my HTC magic
I can’t believe you didn’t list Pandora. Pandora all the way, baby!
best i’ve used is nexus radio… outstanding.
Three great free apps for the iPhone are Pandora, iHeartRadio, and Last.FM. With those, you can listen to music for free. iHeartRadio offers iPod listening to actual radio stations throughout the United States.
GrooveShark is by far the best…
Live 365 is the best alternative to last.fm. Really fm rocks.
Thanks for update.
These are great. I've been curious to check out some LastFm alternatives.
at last! we need this list of free internet radio stations-
some of them like pandora isnt available outside the U.S.
Also I bookmark some of them thanks
hi mr.keshav i'm lovin last.fm but i use fring(a mobile app) to listen to last.fm ….but der is an alternative player called mobler that asks for last.fm account,if u hav one cud u send me the details so tat i can use…i wud be thankful to u…
No limit ,put all your music on last fm ,great I thought ,but the site is riddled with problems ,there is nothing that I havent had a problem with on last fm ,even going to my profile has to be done by going to the libary first .The radios nearly always say, ooooops sorry not working please try again ,the list is endless from begining to end and the staff are hopeless.All the hours I spent on the profile and they can not spare a few minutes to answer a question or help .
Some one recomended itunes but tunecore there colleges eventually told me that it is for buying music only .
I upload my music for free download and so dont want a load more hassle like I have had with last f mothers. Does anybody agree with me on this ? Which is the site out of the 10 that works like it's suppose to ?