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Streampad is a web music player.  Its not just a music player that plays in your browser. Its a music player that  plays the web.  With streampad you can type in the name of an artist and streampad will return a list of songs by the artist that are on the web. Click on a song to hear it, click on 'add all' to play them all.  Interested in listening to a new band like Deerhoof? Streampad knows of at least 50 songs that you can listen to.  If you would like to learn a bit more about a particular song, click on the 'read' link - this will bring you to a review of the track (via the hypemachine).

 Streampad hooks up to several music sites on the web.  It hooks up to Mp3Tunes, the music locker so you can listen to your music wherever you go.  It will stuff your listening data into your last.fm account (if you give them your last.fm login info).  It will show streampad listeners on a google map (everyone has to have a google map mashup nowadays apparently). It will show you up coming concerts (although it didn't seem to care about where I lived, so I was seeing concert info for shows that were thousands of miles away). 

Streampad can also be used to give you access to your own music collection when you are on the road.  Streampad has a little server that runs on your computer that will serve up your music collection so whereever you are you can listen to your home music collection.  For those of us that have terrabyte-sized music collections that don't fit on an iPod or a laptop.

Streampad is another example of the universal music player -  it lets you play music from any source - helping you to play your music where ever you are (as long as you are connected to the web). However, as with the current crop of universal players, Streampad doesn't offer much in the way of tools for helping you find new music - you have to already know that you want to listen to some Deerhoof when you get to Streampad.  I'm hoping the next generation of web-based music players will start to incorporate some music discovery tools.