A Review of today's MP3 Sites

As we're living in the post-mp3.com days, bands are struggling to find free and accessible services to display their music. Here at Radio-Active-Music.com, we've had plenty of experience in setting up accounts for ourselves and bands we work with. So we'd like to do a quick comparison of some of the major mp3 sites we've worked with lately, and let you know how they can help - or hurt - your promotional efforts.

Myspace.com
Rating: 4/5 (Very Good)
Myspace seems to emerge as one of the top sites competing to replace good ol' mp3.com. Myspace stands out from other sites with its amazing networking capabilities, allowing users to find all sorts of musicians and friends with similiar interests. Myspace offers a clean profile with the ability to stream and/or download up to four songs, as well as numerous catagories including photos, influences, band bios, website, and more.
The bad side is that myspace is easily growing too fast for itself. Numerous server failures are constantly plaguing the system; currently, many bands are having difficulties in making their songs available for download, or even having their account name work - lots of bands that have lately registered go to their www.myspace.com/bandnamehere url only to find themselves back at the home page. Not a good situation for a band trying to promote.
But considering the service is free, easy to register and set up, and a very popular trend in the music world today, it's managable and worth waiting out the small problems.

Download.com
Rating: 2/5 (Poor)
I'm pretty frustrated with download.com. On one hand, I guess I can commend them for attempting to screen every single profile, but if you're going to do that, have the staff to support it. The waiting time on the site claims to be a week or two, but try something more along the lines of two months. On top of that, make a small error, and your profile is rejected, meaning you correct in five minutes and wait another few weeks for the next review.
I've been trying to make a profile for a band on here since December and have yet to have it approved. I give up.
Once you get your music on the site it looks great, but I wouldn't recommend it unless you've got more time and a hell of a lot more patience than I do.

GarageBand.com
Rating: 2/5 (Poor)
Creating a profile was very easy, but in order to upload songs you have to either pay or do a certain number of reviews. Now hey, I run a music promotion site, I don't mind doing reviews. Especially since it'll double as me supporting our friends that have profiles over there!
I wish I could figure out how to do said reviews. I've opened their music player in three different browsers and have yet to get the review function to work. They've apparently just launched a new player that's supposed to be more compatible, which I have to say is nice since I'm not too fond of RealPlayer personally, but it looks like they've got a long way to go to get this new system to work.
I'll keep checking back though. My faith is not all gone.

Soundclick.com
Rating: 3/5 (Acceptable)
Again, profile creation is easy and understandable. A basic (non-paid) account gets you a bio, photo, and three songs, as well as basic mailing list and message board functions if you want. I think my biggest turn offs are visual; the site is a woeful late '90's webstyle, and the pop-ups even make their way into my Firefox browser. Server speed can be a bit slow at times. I do have to say I really do like their radio station creation feature. Users can create their own playlists using files uploaded to their favorite bands' profiles. I've used that feature more than once at work when I hadn't brought in my own computer to jam out with. Users can also bookmark their favorite artists on their home page, making checking for updates and navigation very easy.

Purevolume.com
Rating: 4/5 (Very Good)
Profile creation is much more extensive than some other sites, but if you have the time to sit down and do it right, it really will add to your bands' searchability. Band profiles are easy to find, have a clean appearance, and I've rarely run into server problems.
I think Purevolume is an under-appreciated artist resource today, as I don't see a lot of bands utilizing the site, and therefore not many fans think to either. But I'd highly recommend this site for hosting music downloads and streams.

IUMA.com
Rating: 2/5 (Poor)
I'm pretty sure IUMA is on it's death bed, which is sad, because a few years ago I was really happy with the site. The server speed is dreadful; I'm on DSL but it's like being on a 56K modem for song downloads.
It's really a shame, because IUMA offers several different styles for bands to choose from for their profile pages, and offer much more space for song uploads, including the ability to sort by albums, as well as nice places for a band pic, bio, and more. This would be a great site if fans had the patience to wait on such slow downloads.