Free, Easy Listening From JustHearIt

Post by David Pierce. Find me on Twitter.

The “listen to music online” field is a fairly saturated one. Personally, I use Pandora, last.fm, and Grooveshark on a regular basis, as well as a smattering of other applications when one of those three doesn’t have an artist or song I’m looking for.

Every once in a while, a new player comes out that makes me think it just might be “the one,” the one application that takes over my music listening, either the play-on-demand features or the radio features. Usually I’m wrong. This time, though, I really hope I’m right.

The new application is called JustHearIt, and is, if nothing else, a gorgeous way to listen to music online. The dark interface lets you search for a song, artist, or album, and get tons of results immediately.

Once you find what you’re looking for, you can either click a song to play it, or just drag it over to the player. You can also drag songs to the box underneath the player to create a playlist of songs – perfect for studying, or throwing a party.

For right now, those are the only features – listening to any song and making a playlist – available to the general public. JustHearIt is in private beta, and reserves some features only for its members. With free membership comes the ability to create a library that you can listen to from anywhere, as well as create multiple playlists, rename songs, and save everything for listening later.

Even without membership, though, JustHearIt is worth bookmarking. It’s a lightning-fast application, which makes it better than Grooveshark in my book. Its library is enormous, and it did a great job of finding almost any song I could think of (there were a few stumpers, but no one’s perfect). Getting from the homepage to playing a song is faster than any other application I’ve used, which is key in actually convincing me to use an application.

I’m always wary of music applications, because most tend to just pull illegal songs from somewhere else, but JustHearIt appears to be doing it the right way. The site says that “just hear it pays for licenses from all the major performing-rights organizations…we aim to change the stereotype that free music is illegal…” Other than wondering if it’s sustainable, that sounds pretty promising.

In an already full market, with a lot of great applications out there for playing and organizing music online, JustHearIt is one that’s definitely staying on my radar.

Where do you listen to music online, legally or otherwise?

Photo: jbelluch

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