You can listen to pretty much any song for free, view “most popular” charts, create playlists based on your favorite songs, upload your music library to Grooveshark’s servers, embed songs and playlists on blogs and other websites, and more.

The site offers free “sounds like” radio stations. It’s just like Pandora, only without the licensing restrictions. In my experience, the recommendations are just as good – if not even better – than Pandora’s. It usually takes a few songs for Pandora to understand what I want to hear, but Grooveshark was popping out music I loved within a couple clicks.

It’s easy to register at Grooveshark, but don’t do it if you don’t want to. You don’t need an account to listen to music on Grooveshark. The advantage of accounts, though, is that if you create one you can save playlists and upload your music library.

The website is entirely flash-based, which allows for a prettier interface but takes away from performance. It can be slightly clunky to navigate at times. On the other hand, the site’s design mimics the iPhones, so it’s clean and gorgeous.

So to wrap this up, Grooveshark.com is the cool new kid on the free streaming music block, but it’s got a ways to go before it lives up to its marketing: “The easiest way to discover, share, and listen to music online”? Not quite. But it is pretty cool. I definitely suggest you give it a look. Hopefully the RIAA won’t shut it down.

You can listen to music on the site for free, without any account. But to create a playlist, you need an account. This process is remarkably easy. Just type in your email, username and password on the homepage. You’ll be taken to a new homepage where you can manage your “favtapes” (playlists).

Now you can make your first playlist. Start by finding a song to start with. There are a couple ways to do this. A good start is to search for songs by artist, title, or other keyword. When you find a song, click “Add to Tape.” Just create a new playlist and then add the song.

You can also view the iTunes Top 100 chart, as well as iTunes’ charts for each genre. You can view top hits from each year since 1900. You can even import your last.fm and Pandora bookmarks – one of my favorite features.

One downside to this site is it can be very slow sometimes. For example, as I write this I’m trying to log into my Favtape account in order to confirm some facts. The page has been loading for several minutes already. Usually the site works considerably faster, though.

For legal reasons, you cannot download any songs you find on favtape – at least not for free. Links are available to buy tracks from Amazon.com. You can click to view music videos, lyrics, and similar music. You can even twitter songs that you like.

In short, Favtape.com is one of the best free streaming music services online, but lacks a few features that could make it considerably better. If you’re mainly interested in free streaming music, playlists, and last.fm or Pandora integreation, check it out. If you’re looking for speed or downloadable tracks, consider one of the alternatives.

If you want to download a song, just hover your mouse over it and right-click on the button that says “Right Click and click save as.” Then… you guessed it! Click “Save as.” The downside to this? For legal and practical reasons, Hushie doesn’t host the MP3s – it just aggregates them from other sites. The result: Sometimes the audio quality is poor, and the ID3 data varies significantly from file to file.

The recommendations feature is kind of tucked away in the top left corner of the page. Click “Suggest” and then type the name of an artist. Then you’ll get a long list of similar artists that you might like. It gets the job done, but hardly compares to the recommendations on free music streaming sites like last.fm or Pandora.

This is one of the few sites for free streaming music I’ve seen with built in discographies. The implementation could be better, but it’s pretty good. When you search for an artist, a list of albums is displayed along the right side of the page. Click on one and you get a track listing with links to listen to and download each song.

In short, Hushie is an excellent place to go when you can’t find an MP3 on iTunes, but if you want a consistent source for MP3s, this isn’t it, and if you just want to stream music free without downloading, you’d be better off with Seeqpod.com or Favtape.com.

1. Imeem. There are a lot of music social networks online, and a lot of them offer free streaming music, but Imeem is probably the only one that gets it right. You can stream high quality versions of pretty much any song you can think of for free. You can email, embed, and blog songs. Recommendations are more limited than on last.fm, but you can play related songs in a Pandora-esque player.
2. Seeqpod. Probably the most powerful free streaming music search engine on the internet. You can create playlists that can be embedded or sent to others, and often watch videos for the songs you find. There’s also a streaming iPhone version. Because of the flexibility and power of Seeqpod, many other developers have built their sites on top of the Seeqpod engine.
3. Hushie. Based on Seeqpod, but with the ability to download songs in addition to streaming them. You can also view discographies and search by ID3 tags. There’s also a music recommendations system, which isn’t as fancy as last.fm or Pandora, but nevertheless gets the job done. But the main reason to use Hushie is the download feature – something none of the other free streaming music sites have.
4. Favtape. Favtape is like the now-defunct Muxtape, but packed with extra features. For example, you can import your last.fm or Pandora bookmarks, view top songs from every year going back to 1901, view lyrics for every song. And like the other sites on this list, Favtape provides basic recommendations in the form of a “similar artists” list. Oh, and you can create and share “favtapes,” which are playlists/muxtapes.
5. Deezer. A Germany-based social music site. The most fun feature of this site is its “blind tests” – basically playlists where you have to guess the name of each track’s artist as quickly as you can to gain points. You can also make your own blind tests to send to your friends. You can also use the site to host and share your MP3s, and listen to genre-based radio stations. Plus, there’s an iPhone app that lets you access the site from your iPhone or iPod Touch. The downside? The selection of music that can be streamed for free is limited compared to the others on this list.

Each of these sites has something to offer. You could use Imeem for discovering new music, Hushie for downloading that music, Favtape for streaming your Pandora bookmarks, and Deezer for playing “guess the artist” with its blind tests.

But they all offer free streaming music, and features that you just can’t get on other sites.