Soundclick.com

Soundclick.com

WHY: Soundclick is a staple in the online music communities world. It has been around since almsot the beginning and is one of the few sites from the original mp3.com days . It has an extremely large user community that consists of both musicians and listeners which creates a potentially large listener base. It also has recently implemented an embedable music player that you can put on your own site. You can also upload an unlimited number of tracks. The biggest drawback however is that it doesn’t afford all of the flexabilities of a true social network. It is slowly moving there, but the features are slightly tacked on and following and communicating with users is a little cumbersome compared to other sites. For a pure hosting solution it is hard to beat though.

Myspace.com

Myspace.com

WHY: While Myspace these days is arguably a cesspool for communications it still does one thing extremely well and that is hosting for musicians. The site started out as a solution for musicians to post their information on and it still excels in that field. Myspace has one of the largest community bases around and they have integrated a lot of new music related features. The site however still stuffers from a limited amount of upload space with only 10 songs, terrible site design and a very clunky user interface.  Also, one of the strongest features for musicians, the calendar, is not relevant for most electronic producers. The pure potential of userbase however still makes it an enticing place to put your music for fans.

Virb.com

Virb.com

WHY: Arguably, Virb is verything Myspace should have been, but it hasn’t quite blossomed into the go to place it should. It features all of the core tenants you would find on Myspace, but with a much cleaner interface, social network integration, easy site modifcation and much more. You can even add an unlimited amount of tracks for free, integrate your Twitter or Youtube (or any number of other sites). The biggest downfall here is that the user community is rather small, especially when compared to other sites. It also does not feature an embedable mp3 player to host on your own webpage or to distribute online.

Soundcloud.com

Soundcloud.com

WHY: Soundcloud is the newest member to the game, being less than a year old. In that year however it has grown substantially. Soundcloud can best be described as a Twitter for music producers. The community is mostly made up of  musicians and your music is fed to your subscribers in a  twitter like feed. The strength in Soundcloud though is not in the community itself, but its ability to be a platform that can leverage other communities. Soundcloud is perhaps the most open of all of the sites listed here. It features an embedable and customizable player that can be posted almost everywhere. The site features Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed and RSS support for your music uploads. It even has a dropbox feature where people can drop music off to you. One of the other big assests of Soundcloud is the inline comments users can make for your tracks. The player allows users to insert a comment at any point on the timeline of your track for reviewing purposes or just for fan purposes. The free service offers only five uploads per 30 days however, but there is no limit to how you can distribute/embed the players or to how many tracks you can ultimately have.

TheSixtyOne

TheSixtyOne

WHY: This last choice probably has people saying “huh”? TheSixtyOne is a site that is almost completely different than everything else listed above. TheSixtyOne is not really a hosting music site in and of itself, but rather it is a social voting site for music perhaps comperable to Digg.com. As a musician you can upload your music to the site where it will be voted upon by users and the community and ranked in the chart system. The site claims that it is more oriented towards music culture than pure music, but the premise is based around a completely democratic user base that is mostly listener not musician based. If you are looking for true listeners to your music TheSixtyOne is a fantastic way to break out of the echo chamber. The one major downside is that they limit the number of uploads you can have based on your popularity. Your listens earn you credits to upload more music. There is also no way to bring your music out of the site onto your own page.