Finding New Music

It is a triumphant feeling when you find a new musician or artist.  Here are the top 10 tools that I use to find new music (in no particular order).

1. Pandora - You create a station with your favorites and Pandora will automatically include similar artists.  You can create up to 100 stations, so you can organize based on genre or mood.  You can also connect with friends.


2. thesixtyone - I recently discovered this site and I love it.  It is full of new artists. When you load the site, a song will begin playing.  You can "love", share or leave feedback on the song.  The more "loved" the song, the higher it will rank. The concept is similar to Digg, but it is only for music.


3. The Hype Machine - The Hype Machine pulls feeds from all kinds of mp3 blogs into one location.  Tracks with the most buzz migrate to the top.


4. music-map - I featured music-map a couple of years back when I first discovered the tool. The principle is simple. Enter an artist that you like. The music-map tool returns a grouping of similar artists in cloud form. Artists close to each other have the greatest probability that you will like both of them.


5. Last.fm - Last.fm is really similar to Pandora.  The tool uses a process they call "Scrobbling" to discover more music that may meet your interests.  Scrobbling works by keeping track of your most played music, music you have indicated you like, number of plays for a particular artist, the tastes of your friends, etc.


6. YouTube - I could easily spend all day browsing around finding music on YouTube. I'll find a song that I like and then start checking out some of the recommended/related videos in the right column.  Like most social sites, you can "favorite" or "like" videos for return viewing. I often use Wikipedia in correlation with YouTube (and really with most of these tools) to find more information about the artist and their discography.


7. Amazon - Amazon is a great place to buy music.  You can often find free music here.  Search for an artist/album you like.  As with all Amazon products, you can see what else customers bought when they bought the album you just searched for.


8. BBC - I have an affinity for Indie and British Folk Rock.  The British charts feature more this style than the US Billboard.


9. Musicovery - Musicovery is a unique spin on searching for music.  You hover over a mood and an artist fitting that mood will begin to play.  When you click the area, it will up a stream for you.  You can filter by genre or reset the mood at any time.


10. musicroamer - You type in the name of an artist, and musicroamer will return 5 or 6 similar artists. You can double click on one of these similar artists to open artists similar to them and on and on and on.  This is similar to music-map, just a different interface.  In fact, there is a link to music-map on the site.