How do you find new music?
 

Since good music doesn't naturally gravitate to us (at least not to me), how do you all find new music to listen to?

Offline, I sample albums at music stores, but these are usually a hit or miss since most music stores play their stuff on pretty high end equipment, so the music always sounds better there then after I bought it. On very rare occasions I listen to the radio and find some cool stuff.

Online, I go to aurgasm.us (music blog) because the guy who runs it finds the best stuff. I've used Pandora before, with mixed results. Sometimes it gives me good stuff, but most of the time they give me boring stuff. I also tune into Gilles Peterson's radio show, I like the stuff he plays. And right now I'm having a "music exchange" with some people on this forum, and I'm absolutely loving what I hear.

So, how do you guys find new music?

"Music exchange" seems to be the best since you are on a more personal level with the person and they can recommend things that you are more likely to enjoy than a blog for everyone. Last FM was able to give me a few recommendations based on what I listened to that I actually did like so maybe you should try that for a while. Sometimes I actually hear some music I like on commercials or videos online and I look up the artist (sorta how I found Ringo, by hearing her on the Casshern ost and looking her up).

Btw, what is Pandora?

http://www.pandora.com/

It's a website where you can enter in a song or artist and it'll play back similar stuff for you. I've found a couple artists through there, but not many.

And I usually find music by just wandering around the net, talking to people, checking torrents on forums and such. It's mainly a luck thing; very rarely do I get on my computer and set out to find a new artist that I'll like.

Yea, I was just about to edit my previous post and say that. I usually just end up at a new artist by mistake, I might be searching for something completely unrelated to music and see links or something to lead me to a music blog or another artist. But, I get alot of recommendations from my cousin as well. We are like a venn diagram, we have our extremes which neither of us like the others, but there is some stuff in the middle which we can both enjoy and so we constantly recommend any new music we find to the other that we think they will like.

Back in the day I would find all my tops music on Mtv's 120 minutes. Hex yeah, that was a good music show \m/ But of course, like anything good, MTV killed it, and it sorta spiritually lives on as Subterranean on MTV2, and I go there every time I need to go back to the well. When I was working at the radio station, i'd get all my new music from there. That was a fun little farm for me.

Right now I get all my new music from the Justriiingo Online Share Center. Other than that I go by word of mouf and I check out some of the things people post in the "Currently Listening" thread. Guitar Hero also got me into Wolfmother.

I come here of course :)
There's a radio station in Sydney call "JJJ" that I listen to occasionally, lots of indie, non-commercial and unsigned band stuff. In fact if I remember correctly, wolfmother started getting air time from them first before going big. But sometimes non-commercial just means the band suck so hard no ones gonna spend money buying their shits.

I second everything except the Guitar Hero part. I didn't find good music for a long time before I came here

I talk to people that actually listen to good music, I find it randomly on mysplooge, I randomly download torrents when I have the stuff I want, I search by genre (which sucks because 99% of the population has no idea how to classify any music), I browse youtube, etc.

Ah. Genre. That is such a confusing thing. Which brings me to ask: How do you classify SR/TJ's music in your tags? I put Japanese under genre for all of them, even those sung in English. I wonder if anyone here labels the music individually according to the style of the track? I guess it'd be more useful for creating smart playlists in iTunes, but I prefer the one genre thing just because it looks neater, even though it gives almost next to no information about the style of the song, but hey, I already know them by heart.

(and I just went off-topic.)