Turntable.fm

To save ourselves from listening to our mom's record collection on repeat during this weekend's family gathering, we're taking on DJ duties. Forget flipping discs on a boombox; hook some powerful speakers up to a laptop and sign into these online music services to keep the party moving with new and unexpected tunes.

• Pandora — A classic, Pandora keeps us going through the work day with our curated stations. Due to copyright licensing, listening to songs by the same artist is limited, but the service does allow you to skip over song fails.
• Turntable.fm — We're taken with discovering new music through this new online digital music service. Hop into a crowd-friendly room; the "I <3 the 80s" room is a good choice.
• 8tracks — Mixtapes make a comeback on 8tracks, which lets users listen to mixtapes created by the community. Listen to playlists based on artist or genre and follow users whose mixes you love.
• Spotify — Check out what your friends are listening to and discover new tunes with this free music service. You can pay for upgraded and premium services to get wireless streaming on your iPhone too, which makes it easy to plug and play to whatever iPod dock your parents have lying around.

Click through for three more online music resources.

Add one more website to your daily tech addiction — Turntable.fm, a digital music site with a seriously social premise. While adding a social element to services has become ubiquitous, the social side of Turntable.fm is simple, and the reason for its popularity — share good music with friends and strangers in real time.

Sign up for Turntable.fm via Facebook friends already in on the service. Choose which music room to have your avatar enter based on the room's name; think of it as a virtual nightclub without strangers spilling drinks on your shirt. If nothing sounds appealing, create a room of your own and invite friends. Each room has from one to five DJs spinning, while the rest of the room's listeners "stand" in the crowd voting whether songs are awesome/lame, talking in a sidebar chat room, or queuing up songs from Turntable.fm's large music collection or their computer's music library. If you deem a song awesome, the DJ will earn points, which can be used to change the avatar, and most importantly, up the user's music credibility. About 140,000 users have signed up in the first month since Turntable.fm launched.

Everything about the service, so far, is free. Like Pandora, the site is able to legally function under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, with a limit on the number of songs that can be played by one artist in the same hour. For the time being, international users can't access Turntable.fm, but for those located in America, hop in a room and discover new tunes.