tom.ternquist – a place for my things.

If you’re like me, you’ve had a moment where you’re out at someone’s house, or at a party or in the car, and there’s this one song you just need to put on. If you’re lucky you have your iPod with you, but usually you don’t. Enter online music. It’s come a long way since the days of Napster. Plenty of sites offer music that’s either free or close to it. Some even let you sync your personal collections for music on the go.

One of the largest sources of music online is YouTube (youtube.com). You’d be hard-pressed to find an artist who doesn’t have at least some content on it. The problem is that YouTube is designed for video, not pure music. You can’t easily make playlists, the quality of audio is pretty dismal, and it’s about as far from the comforts of iTunes as you can get. Fortunately, there are quite a few sites out there that organize YouTube’s music content in ways that give a much better user experience.

Songza (songza.fm) and Playlist.com do just that. If you’re looking for the quickest way to play a song, Songza is hard to beat — just type the artist or title and click song you want. As its name would suggest, Playlist.com has the advantage over Songza when it comes to finding playlists. Along with track results, you also get a list of user-created playlists based on your search.

YouTube videos are great for something quick, but for more serious listening there are a few sites out there that give an experience that’s comparable to iTunes. Lala (lala.com) is an online music community that’s backed by the major labels and is packed with features. Users can add songs to their own collection from Lala’s library, create and share playlists, listen to dynamic mixes and more. If Lala doesn’t have a song you want, you can upload a song yourself — it’s even possible sync your entire music collection to Lala. Not all of this is free, however — Lala only allows a limited number of uploads before you need to add credits to your account, and most tracks have restrictions on how often they can be played.

Finding music you already know is great, but at some point you’re going to want to listen to something new. The obvious choice is Pandora — for a radio station style music discovery, it’s way ahead of the pack. With iPhone, Blackberry and desktop versions, Pandora lets you listen to music nearly everywhere.

If you’re looking for a more hands-on discovery experience, the countless music blogs are a great place to get some of the newest music out there. The Hype Machine (hypem.com) is an incredibly useful site that follows the most popular music blogs, letting you listen to and download the latest tracks posted on them. The Hype Machine is also a great place to start looking for blogs that follow the music you’re into.

One of the more unique music communities out there is thesixtyone (thesixyone.com). It focuses on community features that attempt to foster creativity and includes an adventure game element with quests and abilities that encourage users to discover new music. For example, listening to four different moods on the home page will award users with 10 reputation points. These points help you “level up” giving you access to more features, as well as an increase in social ranking. Aside from the adventure related features, thesixtyone boasts a bazaar component for labels and artists to promote and sell content.