It's the new social: Music discovery services

What is it?
Hot dang! This here's one groovy baby. The interface is frankly gorgeous and it already has 2 million songs in its catalog booty. Did we mention that it is free? All tracks can be streamed in their entirety along with an album art display that looks suspiciously like the iTunes' Cover Art feature. However, watch out for the laggy Flash interface and the three-songs-per-artist limit for each playlist.

Discover factor
Most top 100 pop artists are presented here. We ran a search on Todd the Wet Sprocket (remember them?) and Finetune served up their entire discography of songs. You can pick Artist's radio, listen to any of the user-created radio stations or make your own 45-song playlist. There's also an autofill option, if you don't feel like handpicking your own. Did we mention it's cool? Cool.

What is it?
If you like the concept of social bookmarking, chances are you would like this, too. Taking naming inspiration from Digg (famed social bookmark site), democracy is obviously the preferred ideology at iJigg. Users ballot on their song of choice and the popular vote will carry the song to the top of the iJigg charts. Sort of like Billboard.

Discover factor
Getting targeted music can be a mixed bag. Unlike other music discovery sites, you can't tag similar-sounding songs together. Instead, you can search by genre, but it's not very effective. The iJigg database holds mainly offerings from independent artists, so Top 40s won't be found here. The iJigg player can also be embedded on other sites so favourite tracks can be shared with friends.

What is it?
Nothing like the box that the Greek gal opened, Pandora is an offspring of the Music Genome Project (MGP) built to analyse and categorise music attributes. It's fabulously easy to use and is one of the best music discovery sites we found. All you gotta do is submit an artist name and Pandora will populate a radio with tracks it thinks you will like.

Discover factor
What really wowed us was that the Pandora interface will question the user on the suitability of the song. Give it a thumbs up and Pandora will introduce more tunes along the same lines. Boo it and Pandora will drop all other similar tracks of its type. It will even explain why it picked the song. Awesome.

What is it?
MySpace is now the biggest social network site on the Internet. So it's obviously a great place to hunt for music if you are looking for recommendations from friends. Each music artist has a personal page on the site where visitors can stream/download tracks, send messages to the band, check out tour schedules and chat up hot chicks who dig the same music you do.

Discover factor
If you want to look up some new songbirds, the buddy list has a bunch of music people your band considers cool enough to be included. Else you would need to use the MySpace search engine or browse the site.