New Season, New Music: 5 resources to build your perfect summer soundtrack

For those who want to discover new tunes for the summer before the season’s music festivals begin, there are tons of resources a click away to help shake up your music routine.

I surveyed a sample of free* apps and websites to come up with this list of five:

Gnoosic

Perhaps the simplest way of finding a new artist outside of asking a friend, gnoosic.com asks that you enter up to three favorite bands or artists and it will spit back a suggestion based on your entries.

Pros: Remarkably easy to use and, in my experience, makes great suggestions based on your entries.

Cons: You cannot listen to the music directly on the website; it only gives you a name.

Pandora

The original streaming radio, you can choose stations based on genre, artist, song, or theme to play directly on a device or from the Pandora website. Its presence in the music industry makes it a favorite to turn to for new music.

Pros: Works just like a radio, with music playing in real time but with the novelty of having those songs fit into a category of your choosing

Cons: Frequent ads and limited skips make it difficult to be exposed to a variety of new music.

iTunes

Known more for being a resource to purchase music than to discover new tunes, iTunes introduced its Radio section to keep up as interests have shifted from owning music to discovering and renting it. Similar to Pandora, it offers stations based on genre, artist, song and theme.

Pros: iTunes comes with Apple devices – that one account can be used both for the radio and for purchasing music. If you like a song, you can easily purchase it as the songs that play link to the iTunes store. iTunes also has a “Genius” feature that acts like Gnoosic without manual entry, giving you suggestions based on a selection of your music.

Cons: Like Pandora, there are ads and limited skips. An additional annoyance is that most non-Apple products do not natively support it.

Spotify

My personal favorite for convenience and access to music, Spotify has the same radio features as iTunes and Pandora. Though this does include ads and limited skips, it comes with the ability to select and listen to a song in full.

Pros: In addition to a radio feature, searching an artist or song returns not one, but tons of different playlists that will likely lead to new music discoveries.

Cons: Some artists do not officially support their music on Spotify (the flipside to that is many lesser known artists can use the platform to get attention).

SoundCloud

More for the purpose of releasing music than listening to it, SoundCloud exists both in app and website form and is a great forum to discover mixes.

Pros: Ideal if you are looking for a fresh take on a favorite tune or something entirely new. There is also a forum for comments, which pop up at different points of the song to allow users to interact with the track.

Cons: It offers less variety in the genre of music. And because the number of downloads available per artist is based on the premium they pay, you may be left without a ready-to-play version of the song offline.

*There are premium versions of the latter four (Pandora, iTunes, Spotify, SoundCloud) available for a cost that limit ads and provide unlimited skipping, but those reviewed for the purposes of this article are the free versions.