Finding new music
Information architecture maven Lou Rosenfeld recently acquired an iPod, much as I did. One thing that bothers him is that because the vast majority of the music on his iPod is ripped from his own collection, most of the music is stuff he already knows. He wants to know how people find new music. I noticed the same thing (although my music collection is so large that there’s actually a sizeable amount of stuff in the 9 days worth of music I’ve put on my iPod that I’ve listened to only sparingly if at all). I wrote yesterday about the experience of listening to the iPod on random shuffle, where it was akin to listening to the radio, except that nearly every song elicited the reaction, "hey, I know that song", which happens pretty rarely when I listen to the radio.
Which gets to the first way I find new music. I listen to the radio. My taste in music is odd and eclectic enough that it’s pretty hard to find radio stations that play stuff I might be interested in, but living in the New York area, I’m blessed with access to stations like WFMU that constantly introduce me to new music. Ann Arbor is a college town; it’s bound to have something similar. I also listen to shortwave radio; John Peel and Charlie Gillett on the BBC World Service, Martha Hawley on Radio Netherlands, and Lucky Oceans on Radio Australia are always introducing me to things I haven’t heard before. Netcasting of stations from around the world also opens up possibilities. For the world music I love so much, there are a couple of great monthly shows hosted on a site called Mondomix, by the aforementioned Charlie Gillett and by Ian Anderson (not the guy from Jethro Tull), who used to host a program on the BBC World Service some years back. (Unfortunately, their audio server is down now, but hopefully it will be back before long.) Then there are the stations from non-western countries that I listen to. The Ghana Broadcasting Corporation sometimes plays old 1950s highlife music that I haven’t heard before (although they also play 1950s highlife music that I own copies of as well, oddly enough). Radio Tanzania Zanzibar plays taarab music that I’ll never find in my local record store. But those don’t generally address the question of how to find music I can consume at my local branch of Tower; they’re just something to tickle my ears.
The second way I find new music is to read. I read a few music magazines religiously. For world music, there’s a UK magazine called Folk Roots, edited by the aforementioned Ian Anderson, that does an excellent job of covering just what the name describes. I find out about a lot of music that way. A U.S.-based magazine that you’re more likely to find at Borders that covers much of the same ground is Dirty Linen. I don’t know what kind of music you’re interested in, but there’s bound to be a magazine or two that cover your particular genres of interest. There used to be a lot of music-related fanzines, but they seem to have died out by and large (I think I saw maybe one of that genre at Tower this afternoon), killed by mailing lists on the Internet.
Which is related to the third way I find music: recommendations from friends and other trusted parties. In the old days, before the stench of the sewer-like odor overpowered me, I used to get a lot of recommendations from like-minded folks on Usenet, particularly rec.music.misc. I’m still friends with some of the people I met in those days, and I get recommendations from them. I also participate on a few mailing lists in genres I’m interested (like one about indie rock from New Zealand, for example), and find that’s a pretty good way to find out about new music. I’ve also gotten recommendations from friends in foreign countries when I’ve visited them; I have a bunch of Czech CDs in my collection, for example, that were recommended to me by a musician friend of mine who I stayed with in Prague.
The last way I find out about music is to occasionally take a flyer and buy something blind. I’m a lot more likely to do this with compilations these days, and I think most people would be. I discovered a lot of great indie rock from Germany by buying a single compilation about seven or eight years ago, something that has blossomed into more than a couple dozen CDs in my collection now. I haven’t done too much of this in the past couple of years as my income has taken a severe hit and blind purchases of music were the first thing on my list of expenditures to cut.
Note that nowhere on my list does there appear "downloading from an online service." Software is kind of thin on the ground for my Mac for post-Napster systems, although I know some exist, particularly for OS X, which I don’t run very much. And they’re a pain to use; the few times I’ve tried, I generally didn’t find what I was looking for. When Napster did exist, I did some "sampling" of new music that led to purchases, but not a whole lot in the context of my entire music collection. That said, Apple’s new iTunes Music Store seems to offer an interesting possibility. I did find myself listening to the 30 second samples they offer, although I have yet to take the plunge and buy something from them. Now that I have the iPod, I might. It’s worth looking into.
Posted at 9:42 PM
nice rundown on finding new music, ralph. something else i’d throw into the mix is epitonic.com. they have good, concise bios of bands in a variety of genres, with links to similar sounding or related bands. they provide 30-second samples and full songs. you can’t download the mp3’s for keeps, but you can get ambitious and assemble your favorite tracks in what they call a blackbox. you can also stream music in various combinations, such as all the songs from a specific label. they also have "walkthroughs" so you can learn about new genres like trance (hi, marshall). best of all, they aren’t trying to sell you anything.
Posted by shirley at 1:03 PM, June 1, 2003 [Link]