Top 8 Sites To Listen To Free Christmas Music Online
Halloween is over and Thanksgiving is coming up. Then comes Christmas.
Yes, it’s that time of year again: weekends are spent baking cookies, tempting Xmas treats, seasonal decorations in every store and cheesy songs on the radio.
If you want to get into the mood with music you enjoy or accompany your Christmas celebrations with a quality selection of songs, check out the following best websites to listen to free online Christmas music.
8. Jingle Bell Jukebox
Jingle Bell Jukebox allows you to listen to entire albums worth of free online Christmas music.
The archive contains nine albums, including Dean Martin’s “My Kind of Christmas”, Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas”, and Amy Grant’s “A Christmas Album”.
You can skip songs and switch between albums. Each album is played in a loop.
7. Radioio Holiday Channels
Radioio has launched three channels dedicated to holiday music. They are Christmas Traditions, Country Christmas, and Today’s Christmas.
The player is simple and easy to use. You can choose a bitrate (64 or 32), see which song is being played, which other songs were played recently, and quickly change to another holiday channel through a menu on the left (not shown below).
6. AOL Radio Christmas Music
AOL radio features a great selection of radio stations, including Christmas music.
The link above directs you to a site listing them all. Click the play button next to a station to launch the player.
Inside the player you can also switch between categories and stations.
If you like a channel, you can add it to your presets through the menu at the bottom right. All your presets are listed on the right (not shown in the image above).
5. SHOUTcast Radio
SHOUTcast is powered by AOL music, but the selection of stations is different. There are actually less Christmas-themed stations, however I prefer the options. You can use the web player or listen to the stations in Winamp and other players.
The web player allows to switch between related stations.
4. Web-Radio Christmas Player
Web-Radio also has a selection of stations dedicated to Christmas.
Click on the Web-Radio Player to open it in a new tab or window, then select your Christmas station and enjoy.
Web-Radio offers a Toolbar for IE and Firefox, which comes with a lot of ad material and does not include its Christmas stations.
3. Last.fm Xmas Radio
Last.fm radio stations can be played without creating an account. You can use the radio station I linked to or search for your own. Other Last.fm Christmas-themed stations include Christmas, Weihnachten (German), Noël (French) or Navidad (Spanish).
If you want to block a song you can’t stand, such as Wham’s Last Christmas, you have to log in.
2. Christmas Radio
The easiest to use site to listen to free online Christmas music is Christmas Radio.
You can choose from nine different Christmas-themed radio stations, including Christmas Classics, Christmas Rock, and the Top 40 of Christmas songs.
Songs are played on site through JW FLV Media Player.
A neat little extra is the word cloud to display the headline in different languages.
1. AccuHolidays
AccuHolidays features a long list of holiday music radio stations, for example Holiday on Broadway, Quiet Christmas Eve, Blue and White Christmas, and Celtic Christmas.
Select a station from the site to launch the AccuHolidays player. Alternatively, you can build your own music mix, i.e. mix all your favorite stations. The player shows the current song and you can quickly switch to other channels or modify the list of artists (read: ban artists) used for this station.
I love the option to remove artists from the playlist. Goodbye Mariah and Celine!
If you’re looking for Christmas midis check out Christmas music from All Things Christmas.
What is your favorite Christmas song and which one do you hate the most? I have to admit I don’t mind Last Christmas at all. My favorite, however, is a different one each year.
Image credits: quitargoa
(By) Tina has been writing for MakeUseOf since late 2007.
Don’t people know by now that mp3s sound like crap compared to true music that has not been stripped down just to save bandwidth and disk space? Why spend money for an mp3 album when you’re only receiving 2/3s of the music.
Beyond that, I can’t wait for Christmas to be over with. (yes, humbug!)
Shel,
mp3s are stripped only of musical elements that are not audible to the average human ear. Add some cheap headphones and even a musical expert will hardly be able to tell the difference. See Wikipedia for details.
If, however, you are the owner of a fine ear and have invested in a quality sound system, it’s worth spending the extra money for a full quality CD.
Christmas Corner has a page that has midis and the lyrics to the normal Christmas carols (can print it out too), plus a radio widget to play Christmas radio stations. So, that one page kinda covers it all. Pretty nice. carols and christmas radio
Don’t forget . Start with either a Christmas song or Artist with “(Holiday)” after the name.
Problem with Pandora is that it’s only available in the US (legally). So I dropped it since I’m not in the US.
So if that’s the case, why not strip 1/3 of the players in the orchestra of their jobs? Save money! And with all due respect, my hearing isn’t so great, but I can tell the difference, and I can’t even play an instrument! Heck, many people apparently think music coming out of their 3/4″ cellphone speakers sounds good, so what can I tell you? Anyone who thinks mp3s sound good have got to be under the age of 35. Why is it that we have .ogg and .wav? I dare you to record something from a vinyl disk or even a store-bought CD, save it in both .wav and .mp3 and then compare the difference. Then let me know.
Shel,
mp3 strips highs and lows that are produced by musical instruments in addition to the tones that the average human ear can hear. I don’t say there is no audible difference at all. There definitely is, but with a high bitrate encoding it is marginal.
Comparing this to removing instruments/players from an orchestra is ridiculous. It’s more like providing the audience with protective earplugs that swallow the noise.
But what is your point bringing this up here anyways? Do you have a FREE quality alternative? Please share!
Terrific list, thanks for sharing. I had no idea there were so many options. People might enjoy Pandora.com as well.
Ummm, how do you ignore the site ranked #1 for “free Christmas music”?
http://FeelsLikeChristmas.com
It’s designed for downloads, not streaming…so maybe you have heavy emphasis on the word “online”…but these are all indie artists, and overall, really high quality.
Another decent site: http://ChristmasMPFree.com
Chuck,
thank you for your input!
I didn’t miss these sites (and some more), but indeed, they didn’t match with the theme of the present post.
However, they are already on my list for another post.
Thanks for the reply, Tina. MakeUseOf rocks (as usual)! That’s why I’ve been a longtime subscriber.
Very welcome Chuck and glad to hear!
Looks to me like that Jingle Bell Jukebox one keeps adding more albums to their playlist. Their archive now has 12 completely different albums and it looks they add a new album each day. I hope so!
Indeed, some more albums have been added since I wrote this post a couple of days ago. Thanks for pointing it out, Richard!
“Comparing this to removing instruments/players from an orchestra is ridiculous. It’s more like providing the audience with protective earplugs that swallow the noise.”
Of course. I was just being sarcastic in order to make a point. I wonder how Classical music fans would appreciate Mozart in an mp3 download LOL.
Great article though, Tina!
I’ve always liked the Christmas stations available on live365.com, there’s enough variety on there for whatever mood I happen to be in…
Shawn,
thank you for the comment!
What I did not like about live365.com is that it opens in the same browser window and resizes it. It’s actually quite annoying when you have other tabs open in that window.
The play button does not allow to manually open / play the station in a new window. It may just be my browser settings, but I didn’t run into this issue with the sites in my list.
For anyone still interested in live365, here is the link to their Christmas station: http://www.live365.com/cgi-bin/directory.cgi?genre=search&searchdesc=christmas
SomaFM has a great holiday stream:
http://somafm.com/play/christmas
Another site is http://xmas.asthmatickitty.com/. It’s not traditional music, but it is rather sublime.
Thank you for sharing Ezra. I like it!
Contents of christmasmas.com
Well, since I havent had normal hearing in years, I cant tell the difference in live music and a mp3.
Anyways, Tina, good article, and next, maybe follow this with the best free sites to get holiday themed wallpaper, etc for your puters/macs?
After that, how about researching where the best internet controllable light/deco displays are found? Sites like Alek’s Controllable Christmas Lights for Celiac Disease, at http://www.komar.org/cgi-bin/christmas_webcam , is a great example.
Tina,
THANK YOU for this article! We usually listen to LastFM for our “normal” day-to-day music listening while we’re working on our little tub refinishing business here in Tampa Bay, Florida (the workdays go by better with music, always!) but I’m really enjoying the AccuHolidays channel. We’ll definitely be playing this while opening presents tomorrow. Now off to listen to it while wrapping up my baking and the billions of appetizers I have to make.
Happy Holidays!
Dear Shaye,
I’m glad you find the Xmas radios useful. Thank you so much for taking the time to comment. It’s always great to hear when people enjoy what I write about.
Happy Holidays and all the best to you and yours!