Discover New Music

Here is a quick run down of my favourite ways of discovering new music:

First up is Last.FM

Last FM is an internet radio service that plays music based on either similar artists to the one you suggest (with a few songs from the actual artist in there as well) or based on keyword matching.

Artist Matching is nice, but on a lot of artists the selection of music is seemingly a bit random and the playlist is short. This is a draw back of the "social networking" system that Last.FM uses to build up its database of music to play you based on your artist selection. Basically people volunteer to install a plugin called audioscrobbler which monitors the music that you play. If you play Radiohead and then play some Feeder, then it is going to link these two artists together. Quite a simple idea really.

However lets "the people" occasionally play some mozart, but mix it up with some James Brown. Then if you type Mozart it is going to give you James Brown. Not exactly what you were looking for maybe..?

Last.FM was recently bought by CBS for a cool $280 million. They are obviously doing something right!!

Next up is Pandora

Pandora does not suffer from the "random links" effect that is sometimes present on Last.FM as it is not based upon user listening data, but instead on an algorithmic analysis of the music. It is essentially a front end for something called the Music Genome Project. This is an in depth analysis of songs taking into account around 400 characeristics.

The main drawback with this system is that such in depth analysis takes time and there is a lot of music out there, so its quite easy to find something that is not listed. Namely classical music is completely omitted (at the time of writing) though they do make it clear that they are working on it - great stuff :-)

Music Blogs (Often Featuring Free to Download MP3s)

The best music blog discovery site that I have found to date is Elbows. This is essentially a music blog search engine. Search for an artist, song or keyword to find a blog featuring an MP3 of that search phrase. Then visit the blog and browse all of the posts. If you find a good blog then check out the links on that blog to discover more blogs. Prepare to lose HOURS!!!!

Note - using SongBird for the MP3 blog browsing is really nice - it is an MP3 Blog optimised browsing system and looks remarkably like Apple's corporate MP3 offering.

Internet Radio

Internet Radio is a very simply concept. Its just like radio, but it's on the internet. In fact if I am going to talk about Internet Radio, should I just talk about Radio??

Well no not really, whilst the airwaves are expensive to use and are dominated by lots of advertising, the cost of running an internet radio station are comparitivelly tiny. Also there is no limit to the number of radio stations (unlike normal radio where each station must have it's own special piece of very limited bandwidth).

There are loads and loads of internet radio stations out there. To discover them is usually as simple as clicking on the internet radio section of your favourite media player.

Other than that - use the usual techniques to find an internet radio station.

Conclusion

There is a hell of a lot of music out there and more and more ways to discover it. For me the music discovery process has pretty much become my music listening experience. I always enjoy listening to the old favourites and it must be said I have amassed a quite respectable music collection already in my young life (yeah i'm still young I think)

However, sometimes its nice to not even know what track is going to come up next..

If any of you discover any more great discovery resources, please do post them in the comments!