Some tips on finding new music.

Many people ask me how I find out about bands or know about new albums by established bands so quickly. The short answer is that I spend a lot of time hunting around the depths of the internet for new music. I listen to four times as much garbage as I do gold, I just download the gold and leave the garbage were it lies.

There are some things you can do to make music discovery a more fluent process. Over the years I have found a bunch of plug-ins and services that make finding the diamonds in the coal mine easier.

Ex.FM

The first thing your going to want to do is install the Ex.FM plugin. Whenever there is a download link for an .MP3 (or other audio formats) it puts a small play button next to it that will allow you to listen to the song without downloading it or leaving the page. It also automatically creates a playlist of any songs on a webpage.

It does a lot of other things but this is the most useful future in my opinion. Which leads me to my next suggestions.

Read music blogs and magazines. 


Seriously this is how I find out about a lot of music. I read a bunch of music blogs. I'm not talking like two or three I subscribe to well over 50+ music RSS feeds. This is were the latest music can be found and were you should look for hidden treasures.

Don't just limit yourself to Pitchforkmedia.com and rollingstone.com/ there are a lot of small blogs out there that do a excellent job.

Here is a list of a few of my favorite blogs.

http://prettymuchamazing.com/
http://www.tinymixtapes.com/
http://this.bigstereo.net/
http://www.quickbeforeitmelts.com/

These are just ones that I like, however different blogs cater to different tastes in music. Finding a few that you can rely on is a bit hard but not impossible.

Hype Machine

Hype Machine is a music blog aggregator. What it does is pulls all the music from thousands of blogs and puts them in one place. Here you can follow music blogs, friends, bands and even custom searches. It's a fantastic way to see what is trending in the bloggerspher.

Typing in bands you like and finding out what music blogs are posting them can help you find some that you might want to pay more attention too.

HypeM is also a great way to find remixes of songs that may have gone a little stale ... if your into that.

Last.FM 

This is by far one of my favorite things on the internet and has been for a while now. After you install a program last.fm tracks everything you listen to and creates radio stations based on that. It's almost like pandora but way better in my opinion. It has been keeping track of what I listen to and as a result has made some pretty awesome recommendations for me.

The secret here is actually going to your recommendation page and checking out what it has waiting for you every now and again.

The thing about last.fm is that you need to let it collect data before it is really useful. So if you want to get into it download the program, set it up to launch at startup and just forget about it. If you don't want people to know what your listening to you can also make your profile private.

While you at it check mine out here

There are of course many other things I do to help me find new stuff like trading music with a group of friends that have similar tastes as I do and other secrets that I am not willing to unveil ... yet.