It’s 75 degrees here in New York today, so it’s practically August. You know what that means? Social gatherings! Oftentimes with alcohol. And barbecue. And, you know, actual people.
And we all know no party is complete without some sort of music playing in the background. Sure, you could always play music directly from your iTunes, but then you’d be subjecting your precious library to scrutiny from every boozy-breathed guest that wanders by your Macbook.
To avoid such awkwardness, here are a few recommended options for streaming music at your next house party. (There’s always Pandora and Last.fm, too, but you already knew that.)
8tracks
Clean and incredibly user-friendly, 8tracks is a social music service similar to the now-defunct (but unequivocally brilliant) Muxtape. In eight track increments, users can upload and publish their own playlists, or easily browse the curated channels of other users. Believing that “handcrafted music programming trumps algorithms,” the company even released their iPhone app today that users can access through the App Store. The only downside is that 8tracks takes some configuring ahead of time, and playlists are limited to a maximum of two appearances by any given artists (That means “Firework” and “Teenage Dream,” but no “California Gurlz”). This leaves little wiggle room for requests on the fly, but all in all, it’s one of the better music sharing sites out there.
Vupas
Vupas takes advantage of music videos posted on YouTube by doing something counter-intuitive: Shedding the video part. What’s left are audio-only playlists that you can manage with a single, super easy click. It’s user-friendly to the tenth degree, and great for playing songs directly from the cloud (i.e. no actual downloading). The only downside is that since it scrapes music from YouTube, once in awhile your search results will come across videos that no longer exist.