I love music. More importantly I love discovering new music. Increasingly though, I’ve found it hard and harder to come across the next new thing. I think part of it has to do with the fact that I’m not around people that talk about music all the time like when back in high school or college. Since I got my iPod, I never listen to the radio and if I do it’s NPR or nothing. It’s been ages since I’ve even read a music publication, let alone subscribed to one. More and more I’ve come to rely on my constant access to the web for my search for the next hot beats. Thankfully over the last few years some fantastic resources have appeared that make the big hunt much easier.
For the (nearly) random discovery that radio used to offer there are two services that stand out to me for finding new tunes. The first is something that I’ve only played around with a little bit but is really pretty awesome: Pandora. Pandora is a project by the Music Genome Project who’s goal is to catalog all music using a very granular set of categorization and analysis that links similar types of music together. The way Pandora works is you put in an artist or song you already know and love and Pandora creates a streaming “radio station” made up of music that is in a similar vein. As new songs play you can skip, give a thumbs up or a thumbs down and the stream updates according to your feedback. Really works amazingly well.
The second service works in a similar way bit is a little less convoluted in its recommendation process. Last.fm works more as a community submitted way in that you sign up for an account, download a plug-in for your music player of choice and listen to music already in your library. Over time it tracks your listening habits and aggregates it in a number of ways (which is a really fun thing to know in and of itself). You can then create a personal streaming station based on your tastes and it pulls in music from people’s play lists that like the same kind of stuff you do. Again as it plays you can give instant feedback to hone in on what you really are digging and what falls a little flat. Last.fm also has the whole social networking thing going on in that you can see other users who have similar tastes as you and can hook them up as friends, join in discussion groups and send specific recommendations to your friends.
So you’ve just discovered your new musical obsession, where do you go to find out a little bit more about them? The first place I usually end up going is AllMusic. Think of it as an IMDB for music. They’ve got, what I think are pretty spot-on, album reviews, band bios and other essential information. It’s all a little clunky but the content is strong enough I can ignore some usability quirks.
The other service that just came out that REALLY has blown me away is the FoxyTunes Planet. FoxyTunes is a Firefox plug-in that I’ve used for a while now. Essentially it adds a little iTunes control panel in the status bar at the bottom of your browser. What they’ve just added is a search for their new FoxyTunes Planet search (you can also do a search directly on the website). What this does is if you click on the search button you will be taken to the site with an aggregated search of many of the music resources available on the webincludng some mentioned above specific to the song and artist you are currently listing to. Think of it as a Google Home Page for that particular song. You get a blurb from the band’sWikipeda entry, a list of relevant videos on YouTube, a list of related artists from Last.fm, lyrics and much more. It’s an amazingly helpful one stop shop, even for bands you are already familiar with.
So get out there find some new hot beats and if you find anything especially rockin’ drop us a line and let us know. There really isn’t ever too much new music…
