Extension fm introPeople love their music. They like to download it, buy it or stream it any way they can. Extension.fm (Ex.fm) gives you a way to turn the entire web into your playlist, not just what you have on your mp3 player or hard drive.

You may be asking yourself why you would use something like this versus a service like Pandora or Spotify. Well, for starters, you will be able to discover a lot of new music.

One genre I personally like is a mashup. Not many other streaming music services offer this genre. If you aren’t familiar with these type of songs, they are DJ mixes. The song may have music from Green Day and lyrics from a Jay-Z song.

How Extension.fm works

The basic idea is, it is kind of like a music aggregator. What happens you can go to the site or use their Android or iPhone app to search fro a group or song you like. Ex.fm will find it somewhere and play it.  You will also see the site where the song was found along with the person on Ex.fm it is associated with. Pretty simple I think.

Finding a song on Extension.fm

Finding a song is super easy. You can simply enter the name of the artist or song into the search bar. There are also other ways to discover new groups.

Explore tab – The explore tab gives you several ways to look for new groups. You can look by genre, featured site or album, tastemakers, and even the monthly mixtape. There are some really great songs and artist that can be stumbled across this way.

explore

Tastemakers – Tastemakers are simply members who are really active on the site. They seem to have a knack for finding good music.

Trending – There is a trending tab you can check out. If you pick a category, there will be all kinds of different music to sample. You can also find others who liked this song or artist and see what else they liked.

trending by genre

Your Extension.fm account

As you would expect, you need to create an account. This offers a few benefits. Your account will keep track of the songs you Like, give access to your Feed of songs (more on this later), who you are following and who is following you.

There is also a social aspect to your account. You can link your Extension.fm account to your profiles on some of the bigger social networking sites. Liking your social profiles to your Extension.fm account will let you find those friends on Extension.fm if they use it.  You can also share what you are listening to all of your friends and followers on those social sites.

social profile

Sharing your favorites

As I mentioned above, there are options to share your favorite songs with your social site of preference. To share a song, you can click the share button.

sharing icon

Then fill out the info in the pop-up window. If you choose to share it on Twitter, a Tweet will be created with a shortened URL created. The others will be formatted a little differently because they are not so character restricted.

sharing window

Different ways of using Extension.fm

Aside from always needing to head over to the site to access your account, there are a couple of different options.

Chrome extension – You can download the Ex.fm Chrome extension to let you navigate away from the site and listen to your queued music. Ex.fm hides out in your icons and gives you basic controls to navigate through your queued songs.

Update: This extension is not available on Chrome Extension.

chrome extension

Android app – You can head over to the Android market and download the Ex.fm Android app. The Android app lets you access many of the same functions as the site does. The main thing I saw that was removed in the Android app was the search functions. You can play the songs from your the people you follow and tastemakers.

iPhone app – The Ex.fm iPhone app looks to be the same as the app for Android.

Conclusion

I think there will be more sites popping out there like this. Ex.fm is a great way to discover new music and people with similar music tastes. There is a lot of undiscovered music out there just waiting for you to hear it. Being able to search for and stream free music is great, however, the fact the music isn’t all mainstream hits is a big plus for the real music lover.

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