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Most of my life I have strived to find new and interesting music, but I am often far too busy to really dig deep and find new artists everyday. Now that I am done with college and have a real job, I find that I have even less time to find new music or even stay up to date with all of the new bands.
I have, however, found some great resources that keep me in the loop with minimal time and effort.
Pandora is an easy to use music discovery website that has been a favorite of mine for some time. Pandora allows you to create “stations” by putting in your favorite band or bands. Then, Pandora will play songs from that artist and artists that have a similar sound to your main artist. I like Pandora for its no frills approach, as it doesn’t throw a bunch of extra stuff at you.
Last.fm functions much the same way as Pandora, but focuses much more on the social network side of things. Of all the websites and services on the list, I use Last.fm the most. I have found that it has a huge library of tracks that doesn’t stop at the end of mainstream. Their library has exposed me to lots of unknown and underground gems.
StumbleAudio was covered in my previous post Discover New Music with StumbleAudio. It is a great service that is easy to use, but it has a smaller library that is mainly focuses around smaller unknown artists.
The Hype Machine is a very unique website, in that, it aggregates all kinds of MP3 blogs from across the Internet into one place. This way you can find out what bands everyone else is talking about and discover them for yourself.
Musicovery presents a much different experience than most of the other services on this list. At Musicovery, you choose genre, mood and timeframe in order to discover new music. This is definitely a very unique way to discover new music and is worth checking out.
Skreemr is an MP3 search engine that returns webpages where MP3’s of the artist you searched are posted. This allows you to easily listen to your favorite song by that artist. Skreemr also gives you the option to search for similar artists.
iLike is a music social network that is similar to Last.fm, but iLike integrates with your iTunes through a sidebar. This allows you to easily get recommendations from iLike and find more people with similar tastes in order to find find new artists.
thesixtyone allows its users to “bump” up tracks by different artists. It functions in a way that is very similar to Digg, but it is only for music. This way you can find great songs and great artists by using the knowledge of the other users on the site.
Amazon is a site that just about everyone should be familiar with. Back before I knew all about the sites listed above, I would go to Amazon and see what else customers bought when they bought an album I liked. If you keep doing this, you start going down a rabbit hole and can find some great music. The little snippets that Amazon lets you listen to provide you with a great way to sample the artists as you come across them.
What list of places to find music would be complete without blogs? There are lots of great music blogs out there that keep you up to date with current artists and events. I subscribe to Stereogum and Pitchfork in my RSS, and I highly recommend them.
Where else do you discover new music?
Last 5 posts by Kyle Judkins
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Last.fm is definitively the best social music site
Don’t forget Grooveshark, it offers a customizable widget and you can create your own station or listen to others’
Why not try Creative Commons? Free, unique, and absolutely 100% legal to download, copy, share.
Thanks for the list!
My music libraries getting a bit stale at the moment, so its nice to have some places to look for music. I’m a lifelong Last.fm junkie though, it’s been one of my main sources of music for two years.
My collection gets stale sometimes as well, but these sites definitely help me refresh it every once in a while.
Great article. A few sites I didn’t know about - so I will definitely be checking them out. I’m always looking for good music.
Another way to get cool music is to subscribe to music podcasts. Amazingly, I’ve found some great music/artists from podcasts!
(BTW, your Amazon.com link is broken)
Thanks for the heads up on the link.
Nice list. I also sometimes use Slacker (slacker.com)… quite similar to Pandora.
I like a lot of these services, but I also think music is one of those arts where you trust a recommendation from a friend more than anything. I’ve been producing a music interview show for many years called Well-Rounded Radio ( http://www.wellroundedradio.net ) and, although it doesn’t involve lots o’ technology, I know the show achieves that idea of a recommendation from a trusted friend…now I just have friends around the world who trust my opinion, too!
You forgot one of my favorites, Jango.com!
Thanks for the recommendations. I’ve used Pandora a lot and I’m excited to try Last.fm.
Try live365.com
Nice article Kyle, i have basically used Pandora and Last.fm so far till now. Will give other a try
give this search engine a try
http://www.shareyard.com/search
You forgot ThePirateBay.org
Nice article! But I think that to just call theSixtyOne.com a digg for music doesn’t quite work. With theSixtyOne when you spend your points on songs you are betting that they will be popular, increasing your return points. It’s practically a game: you need to actually give songs an honest listen in order to evaluate if you should gamble your points on it or not. A lot more fun than just digging sites.
I think the letter presented to non-US visitors to Pandora definitely kicks it off first place…
[quote]
If you are a paid subscriber, please contact us at pandora-support@pandora.com and we will issue a pro-rated refund to the credit card you used to sign up[/quote]
In other words: we haven’t used your money to pay the (imo outdated) rights to the songs you have listened to, so you’ll get your money back and can get stuffed.
@Bokkie I didn’t know that about Pandora, but it definitely makes me sad that they would do that. Also, the sites listed are in no particular order. They are just the top 10 overall. It is up to you to decide which one you like the best.
what about http://www.deezer.com ???
I’m a Last.fm guy myself.
Oh. And I’ll second http://www.deezer.com …
Nice post. :]
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Barbara
http://www.ipodepot.info
I have really fallen in love with imeem.com. Great collection of playlists and amazing search features. I like it better than all of these. Give it a try
[...] Top 10 ways to find new music <–i use skreemr myself, coupled with songbird. [...]
DOOD!
Skreemr is also SUPER useful in that you can RIGHT CLICK AND SAVE those Mp3s directly. Just right click on the title and save as… i find this the fastest way to get songs, or even entire albums.
Last.fm is great too.
music.for-robots.com <—- cool electronic music
missingtoof.com <—- remikses
Another great site is Yahoo’s radio. You pick genres and bands you like, and they pick other bands for you to hear, radio style, that match what you’ve told them. It’s great.
GetMyStage.com kicks ass!!!! All unsigned and indie artists, always new stuff to listen to, all genres of music.
” Another great site is Yahoo’s radio. You pick genres and bands you like, and they pick other bands for you to hear, radio style, that match what you’ve told them. It’s great. ”
Yeah, if you have a weird fixation with listening to ads for a web service that YOU’RE ALREADY USING, which play after every other song. These ads are also unskippable. Speaking of skips, the free music service lets you skip only about 10 songs in a given listening session.
Yahoo!’s answer to these problems? “Give us your money.”
Dude, I thought that this was a sweet article. But something can not be “very unique” it is either unique or it isn’t. There aren’t any degrees of uniqueness. I normally don’t act as the grammar police, just my 9th grade history teacher basically beat that into my skull and now it really distracts from something if I read it or hear it. Anyway, that’s all I had to say. Not that it will change anything.
I like Last.Fm and HypeM personally.
I’ve also been working on a site to do just this. No knowledge of music required, just press the button for ‘random music generator’ can’t miss it.
I’ve been using Pandora and Last.FM but lately I’ve been spending a lot of time on AccuTunes ( http://www.accutunes.accuradio.com ). Or, if you know what you’re looking for, Musgle ( http://www.musgle.com ) is useful.
I personally like pandora for my music relations and as a radio for my computer, but i use a site called Mix Turtle. its a good MP3 search engine.
I can’t use pandora but I use RadioBeta instead ( http://www.radiobeta.com ). I love the variety and surprise of Radio
Try imeem for new and old music.
Try xpn.org
I use myspace in conjunction with stumbleupon. If I find music I like, I have a look through their fans for similar bands. Great thing is you can download the music on the page.
http://www.musicroamer.com, uses last.fm info. try it out!
[...] you’ve tried both of these be sure to check out “Top 10 Ways to Discover New Music” for 8 more unique tools. Skreemr, an MP3 search engine, and Musicovery, find music from a [...]
Amie Street (http://amiestreet.com) is a great site for finding new Indy music. They have a great pricing mechanism that starts all songs cheap, or free, and gradually increases the prices to $.98 max as their popularity increase. You can find some great music really cheap and also discover some new artist and popular songs using their filtering tools.
I have created the website http://www.albumreminder.com/
This website will inform you of new album releases of your favorite artists.
mievo (mee-voh) my evolution
the site for artists and their fans. there is high quality control panel and the artists can maximize their income by eliminating the middle man.
Alright these look pretty tight
I like Elbows a lot
It’s another blog aggregator
I really liked Pandora and started up a few ’stations’ including ‘The Black Eyed Peas Radio’ Sadly as a UK user I can no longer access it! (copyright reasons). I had 150,000 people signed up to it at one time! Never mind!
Cool site. I often listen to music videos on YouTube. It’s really cool.
wolfgangsvault has a pretty good variety from about 1960-90-all live concert recordings that I haven’t heard since…
Last.fm is probably my favorite discovery of the year.
You forgot Nutsie!
I use MeeMix - http://www.meemix.com
It got this great mood control thingie, and seems better suited/tailored for my taste than Pandora or last.fm
rhadio.com has some cool features for searching youtube for music. there’s a music discography section which lists all an artist’s albums and then tries to match youtube videos to each track.
I use Last.FM and Pandora quite a bit. I also visit music blogs to see what artists other people are interested in. One of my newest favorite music blogs is http://www.thefrontloader.com - it has lots of great articles and mp3s to download in each one.
great articles for music lovers!
Don’t forget Gnoosic http://www.gnoosic.com/ and Musicmesh http://musicmesh.net/. Start on Gnoosic and find a new artist, then go to Musicmesh and see a video of some of their songs and who they connect to in similar sound/style.
What a brilliant sight, just the job for music lovers.
here is a site with over 40 free songs the mars blue music arcive
http://www.marsblue.moogo.com
-enjoy