Jelli

Jelli's logo

When it comes to brilliant and innovative ways to listen to music online (and for free), Jelli has got to be my new favourite concept. On Jelli, online radio stations are set up with a list of songs and listeners vote online for which ones they’d like to hear. The more votes a song gets, the higher up in the playlist the song goes. Apparently each song is only decided in the last 30 seconds of the song before it. Songs can even be killed off as they play if enough people dislike it while it’s playing (that awful parody of Tik Tok was killed off really quickly, such a great moment).

If there’s a song you really want to hear, you also have a limited number of “rockets” which can send your song up the list (I managed to get the Glee song “Don’t Stop Believin” played within about 5 minutes of logging on, good achievement I think!). You also have a smaller number of “bombs” which you can use to stop a song being played.

You can also favourite songs for your own list ready to vote for them each time you listen to the station. Definitely a useful feature! Overall I’ve found the songs played are actually pretty good and there’s a huge amount of choice.

Guvera's logo

Guvera

If downloading music is more your thing, Guvera is a new service which lets you download songs for free (well, paid for by big companies who want you to see their ads instead). Each advertiser has their own page with songs you can download (pages are set up so that the advertising is actually easy to put up with and fun). You earn credits to download songs by putting in information about yourself into your profile to help advertisers meet their target demographic (not sure how you gain more credits after you’ve used those yet). It’s a good site with huge promise but was a little confusing to me at first. I love their mission statement though:

Make music free for the people, prosecute no-one, pay the artists full price, share the love.

Overall, it’s really good to see legal alternatives to stem the tide of illegal downloads. I’m really interested to see where things go from here, surely things can only get better