Thread: The big list of places to find new music

Ah new music. The thrill of finding a new artist that you didn't know about before. It is a great thing. So how do you find new music? I made a few suggestions in a recent thread. And I thought that it would be a good subject to talk about in more detail for anyone who miight be interested.

I get asked a lot how I found this artist or that one or simply how to discover new music in general. Actually it seems like I get so inundated with so many music venues that the real question is how to find enough time to explore them all. But that may just be me - I'm a bit of a music fanatic. The guy with a wall of CDs, vinyl discs that have funny grooves in them stuff like that. So never mind if my perspective seems odd - lets see if we can find something that you don't know about yet.

Back at the beginning of time or before many of us were around anyway, radio stations and record stores were probably how most people found new music. And while those venues still exist, the internet has opened up a plethora or new avenues to explore as well. From MTV, usenet, Napster, youtube, trackers and several billion web pages, there's a lot to take in.

I have to say that I'm still a big fan of listening to radio stations. I love my own music of course, but I'm never going to hear something fresh or discover a new artist if that was all that I listened to. Where I live, you couldn't find a decent FM station to save your life. So I tried satellite radio e.g. Sirius/XM. It's not bad, several hundred stations largely organized by genre and commercial free. But it was also too top-40 heavy & repetitive for me. But when I looked into internet radio, I found a goldmine. There is someone streaming every possible genre that you can imagine somewhere on the internet.

On the internet, you can just as easily find a good FM station in San Francisco as stream something trendy out of Berlin. Listen to really well produced, professional quality shows by real music nuts on CBC (or here), NPR or BBC. Or literally thousands of stations big and small, all over the globe. Yeah that's great you say, but there is nothing that you ever like on the radio. Well how about last.fm? Or similar services musicovery, pandora or spotify? Maybe the new launch, Museeka, if you are in Europe. These folks and a slew of similar sites take a list of music that you already like and their software searches for trends and patterns and streams back music that is more likely to match your tastes. Now we're talking.

If you really enjoy your music, you shouldn't completely dismiss the old school methods either. It's still a thrill to sort through bins of vinyl in an used record store. Of course if your main question is vinyl.. what does vinyl have to with music?.. then you may have wondered into the wrong thread (think of vinyl as being kinda like an old fashioned SACD). And just as important is the opportunity to talk store staff who are often serious music fans too. If you make it known that music is important to you, it's pretty much inevitable that fate and circumstance will bring you in contact with other fan sooner or later. My casual (fanatical?) interest in music has led to friendships with DJs, recording engineers, musicians and on-air personalities. And of course such conversations often lead to new musical discoveries.

What else? Well you probably know about well known sites like youtube. Youtube is a good resource to listen to a quick snippet of some unknown artist. Try not to grit your teeth at the sound quality along the way. It's worth an extra click or two to see which youtube members have a song that you discovered on their channel playlist. Take a peek - if they have a lot of bands that you like on their list, bookmark their page and remember to check out the unknowns on their list too.

I'm not going to get into amazon music, itunes, etc. But you might enjoy checking out some music blogs. Hype machine is an interesting aggregator that brings together blogs from all over the net, usually with a click to listen link. If you find a blog or reviewer whose tastes run parallel to yours, be certain to make a note of their name. Are you a movie buff? Don't forget to pay attention to sound tracks, which often feature interesting or up and coming artists. If you are a big iTunes or iPhone user, you might want to check out the filter or iLike.

I've only begun to scratch the surface of what is out there. Frankly there are so many music related sites, that it's hard to pull together a theme for this post. So I am simply going to leave you with a handful of sites off the top of my head, in no particular order. I hope that you walk away with at least one interesting gem that you didn't know about before.



music roamer, name a band that you like and it will show you a tree of ten more that keeps branching out
gnoostic, name three favorites, then agree or veto each following choice to find similar artists
musicovery, search by genre, mood or date range
stumble audio, a smaller catalog of obscure indie bands. find great music that isn't overhyped
the sixty one, a digg style threading, highlighting up + coming or at least popular artists
deezer, european and international charts
radio beta, explore music geographically or by genre
stereogum, tries to identify upcoming indie and alternative artists
gnod, another AI for discovering music
live plasma, find music by movie, band or artist


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