What are your lesser-known or weird ways of looking for new music?

October 31, 2009 12:05 AM

What are your lesser-known or weird ways of looking for new music?

Besides friends' recommendations, mix tapes, last.fm, review sites/blogs, TV/film song features, and late night talk show musical guests, what are some of your lesser-known or weird ways of searching for new music that others may not know about?

A few of mine:

- Sometimes I search for "recent favourite band + cover" on Youtube and sort them by views to find other new artists who very few people know. Those artists will usually have some of their own original songs available

- Search by lyrics to look for other bands/artists who have written similar words/lines/phrases, example

- Talk to touring bands after their shows and ask some of the band members what they're listening to on the road
 

posted by querty to media & arts (37 comments total)

These days, I get a lot of new music from podcasts. Don't know what your tastes are, but CBC has a ton of stuff online from all three of their radio services, plus on-demand streams. I also love listening to The Late Junction on BBC and searching for the music that comes up there.

All of this is, I guess, derived from an ancient practice known as "listening to the radio" which was always my preferred method back in the day. Not lesser known or weird, but also not on your list.
posted by salishsea at 12:13 AM on October 31

Call me old-fashioned, but I like browsing record shops, and picking up any CD whose cover art appeals to me.

One glorious day, I bought Godspeed You Black Emperor: Lift yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven & Sigur Ros: Aegetis Byrjun on the strength of the cover art & liner notes alone.

OK, so they're not exactly uber-obscure, but at the time they were reasonably unknown, at least down under.
posted by UbuRoivas at 12:35 AM on October 31

In the UK, I'm a big fan of Rough Trade's Album Club.
posted by MuffinMan at 12:56 AM on October 31

I go to karaoke a lot with friends, and end up picking up things they know, or things I found in the karaoke book which caught my attention by name or lyrics. It is especially helpful because there is a lot of Japanese music out there I don't know about.

You can stop laughing at me now.
posted by whatzit at 1:09 AM on October 31

My indy music cred vanishes when you realize I find new bands based on songs I hear in ads. (Cloud Room's Hey Now Now: Pepsi ad. Port O'Brien's I woke up today: Dulux ad. and most recently, I'm contemplating that new Magnum 'royal treatment' ad- I like the piano sound. )

So there's that. :)
posted by titanium_geek at 1:21 AM on October 31

Well this obviously doesn't apply to everyone, but being a college radio DJ forced me to learn about new music and try out new albums.

Also, if any bands I like are on independent labels, I check out the other bands on the label. They are often similar in sound/scene/aesthetic.

Also, amen to asking other bands what bands they like...my favorite question for interviews in fact is "If you could be in any band besides your own, what would it be?" - The Matches said Muse, which prompted me to look them up.
posted by radioamy at 1:45 AM on October 31

I don't know if it counts as weird, but I've found a lot of stuff I've never heard before at Pandora.

Also, along the lines of what you were saying about googling similar lyrics, I've had success doing a search for a word in a song title. My own favorite of this was to find non-Christian bands that had songs with "Jesus" in the title. A friend of mine also made mix CDs of songs with "Sunshine" in the title, and a double CD; one with "Good" and one with "Evil."
posted by cali59 at 1:46 AM on October 31

your local college radio station, dude.
posted by Large Marge at 2:57 AM on October 31

I keep up on a few smaller area clubs that I like to go to. I scan the calendars, and if I see an unknown band name I look it up. I then get sucked into a search involving allmusic, youtube, torrents, and sometimes gnod. amazon's listmania has also thrown me into very random searches.

Whenever I'm moving to a new town I google furiously to find out about the local music scene and clubs. Coming back to my hometown led to the discovery of some small venues, and some pretty decent local bands.

Also, house parties, when I was still in college.
posted by shinyshiny at 3:21 AM on October 31

I like to go to The Covers Project and check out who has made covers of songs I like by artists I like. This can lead me to new music in genres totally different to the song/band I started with.
posted by jonnyploy at 3:39 AM on October 31

Allmusic's "Influenced By," "Followers," and "Similar Artists" are pretty good if you know what sort of sound you like.

I'm also a big fan of browsing in record stores. Pick up a few CD's that catch your eye in the 3 for $5 shelves.
posted by clorox at 3:47 AM on October 31 [1 favorite]

Festival lineups. If I'm going to a festival I'll look up as many bands as possible on last.fm or Spotify beforehand. This year that's brought me: The Low Anthem, Duke and the King, The Leisure Society, Joe Gideon and the Shark, and a few others (some of whom I would have missed because they clashed with other bands that I liked).

Could do the same thing for festivals I don't go to, but that fit my taste, like Glastonbury or Coachella.

And like shinyshiny says, look at certain clubs I like, and check out unknown (to me) bands.

Other option (which I guess counts as friends' recommendations) is the many music threads on AskMe.
posted by Infinite Jest at 3:52 AM on October 31

Radio shows. I don't know about the rest of the world, but the UK has some excellent music radio shows that focus on new or underground music. John Peel's show was the most significant in this area until he died a few years back, but now I listen to Gilles Peterson - he plays a lot of new soul, hip-hop, jazz, world music, and the like. I got into Jon Brion thanks to him. (Gilles is a bit of an international DJ and that page has links to how you can listen to him from several countries, including the US. His shows are a delight, even if it sounds like he's on weed 90% of the time.)
posted by wackybrit at 4:43 AM on October 31

One of the stranger ways I did this, back when there were brick and mortar stores near me, was to go to the bins, then go to the uncategorized "M" section, after walking past the Megadeths, Metallicas, and Misfits. I would then flip through the CDs of bands who weren't important enough to earn their own slot, get twelve to fifteen CDs that looked vaguely interesting, and would listen to them, right there in the store. This got me some surprisingly good music, letter after letter, week after week.

Another technique is to look at all of the members of a given band you do like and check out anything else they've done.

If you're at a club and hear something good, absolutely ask the DJ what is playing.
posted by adipocere at 5:37 AM on October 31

Each issue of The Big Takeover leads to a few new discoveries. There are hundreds of reviews in each issue. I have no connection to it other than a subscription.
posted by otters walk among us at 5:50 AM on October 31

Although you mentioned LastFM as an example of a "well known" way of finding new music I suspect that within the site there is a spectrum of techniques for looking for new music that range from well known to obscure:
Well Known: Let the system make recommendations for you, follow a chain of similar artists or similar songs, see what your friends or neighbours are listening to, group membership etc
More Obscure: For me this involves finding people, artists or songs which both I and another person love but which are relatively obscure to the rest of the world. For me these tracks are often gateways to finding other people who have a library of interesting new music that I would also like. In practice for me making these joins is normally a manual process - but I believe LastFM automates this technique when calculating charts for a particular group: they look at what members the group are listening to and then extract all those tracks that are popular amongst the global LastFM population.

Another relatively obscure method which sometimes works for me is to look up the listening habits of the people who are making the music I like. People who perform - and in particular write - great music often have the best collections of it.
posted by rongorongo at 6:27 AM on October 31

If you see that a band you like is touring or playing a few shows, see who their openers are; they'll often have a fairly similar feel, but are probably just emerging or not as well known. This is how I found Arcade Fire, a few months before Funeral released and they blew up.
posted by sarahsynonymous at 6:36 AM on October 31

Not new music, but new-to-me foreign music: back in the Napster days, I got into bhangra music and wanted to find more so I noted a few words that appeared in more than one song title and searched for those. I still don't know what they mean, probably "love" or "the" or something, but they led to lots of other music in the same language.
posted by bink at 7:37 AM on October 31

I listen to the Hype Machine Music Blog. It aggregates tons of music blogs. There is an embedded player so you can listen to what people have just posted without leaving the Hype Machine site.
posted by mmmbacon at 7:43 AM on October 31

Tastekid
posted by craven_morhead at 8:12 AM on October 31

Twitter is great for this. It's the only reason I use Twitter.

There are lots of great users who post links to songs and artists. I try to post about one song a day about anything from new singles to small local bands (I won't plug myself, but MeMail me if your interested or want a place to get started from). I've found a lot of great music this way. In addition, by posting links yourself, it encourages you to go out and find even more great music. Win - win.
posted by Kippersoft at 8:46 AM on October 31

the popular section on hype machine.
posted by anthropomorphic at 9:34 AM on October 31

This is kinda silly, but recently, I've put together a week's worth of YouTube playlists purely by searching for the names of the day of the week. If it's got the day of the week in the title and is mentioned in the song itself, it goes on that day's playlist. Granted, I've had to throw some stuff out as being not-quite-to-my liking, but I have discovered plenty of awesome bands this way. I think I'm going to start on seasons or months next.

Also tiny mix tapes is pretty awesome.
posted by MuChao at 10:08 AM on October 31

Wikipedia? Browse by genre, nationality, topic, instrument/genre... pretty much any categorization you can think of. Won't help too much in finding the hip new artists, but you'll certainly find stuff nobody's ever heard of.
posted by gueneverey at 10:48 AM on October 31

I was digging Blip.fm last spring, it's a hybrid between a radio station and twitter. You can find a DJ wih similar tastes and follow the thread of their followers and or playlists.

They also have a straight up Search by Taste feature.
posted by jeremias at 12:40 PM on October 31

I've found some interesting stuff from the "Pick of the week" cards you pick up free from Starbucks.
posted by i_like_camels at 2:14 PM on October 31

My favorite weird way to find new bands is to check out the shirts people wear to the shows I go to. The demographic tends to much younger and hipper than myself, and gives me more new ideas than from my circle of friends. That's how I found Gogol Bordello, as an example.
posted by Requiax at 2:39 PM on October 31

8tracks, an online user-generated mix-tape site. There are multiple reasons why I like it, including finding mixes according to genre, and that it lets people upload music tracks to their mix - i.e. the lesser-known gems you probably wouldn't have stumbled upon otherwise.
posted by lizbunny at 3:07 PM on October 31

If it's not through radio (wfmu/last.fm/pandora/etc) I normally find 'new' music by researching bands I already like - their earlier incarnations, side projects, and affiliated acts and genres. Ideally, Guided by Voices leads back to The Who, and Smashing Pumpkins back to Led Zeppelin. I don't know who leads back to Todd Rundgren, but my basic thesis is that it's relatively easy to find new contemporary music to listen too, and relatively more satisfying to find older/overlooked music.

To this end, mp3 blogs are a godsend. If you've recently come to love, say, The Sound or Epic Soundtracks, chances are that whatever blogs are hosting said bands' albums will have other music of interest.
posted by unmake at 5:04 PM on October 31

I listen to SoundOpinions and also will work my way through some of the Best Albums of 200x articles that appear every year.
posted by salvia at 6:16 PM on October 31

I download the SXSW torrents, play them on shuffle and rate them. If you're willing to wade through literally hundreds of crappy songs, you will find some real gems. I found most of my favorite bands this way.
posted by skintension at 9:03 PM on October 31 [1 favorite]

I listen to non-stop internet radio (except in the car) and I find most of my new music that way. Every now and then I get bored with the stations I'm listening to, so I search by random words in WinAmp. For example, I was searching by various animals and thus found Pig Radio, and more new music.
posted by zinfandel at 9:04 PM on October 31

Last century I was drinking champagne and relaxing on an expensive 1920s leather day bed in the show room of my then-lover's antique store when my eyes came to rest on the shelves and shelves of cds in his office. He made a sweeping gesture with his arm and said, "I only deal antiques to feed my music habit".

He introduced me to Uncut. Published since 1997 and produced in the UK, each issue includes a menu of meaty articles, more than 150 reviews, and a cd of tracks themed in some way to the issue - this month: 15 tracks inspired by The Velvet Underground.

I usually find 2 or 3 new artists each month from the cd alone and the reviews cover a wide range of genres. I really like how the feature articles are long and mostly contiguous (25+ pages) and the ads are not intrusive. It's edited by the entertaining and experienced Alan Jones previously of Melody Maker.
posted by Kerasia at 4:07 AM on November 1

There's treasure everywhere at the local library!
posted by timshel at 6:30 AM on November 1

My local library stacks recently returned CDs on a cart before reshelving them. It's a smallish branch, so there may only be 60 or so discs there at any time, but whenever I stop in I flip through them. It's a sort of "recently heard in the neighborhood" collection. Not always the newest tracks, but often new-to-me.
posted by mumkin at 9:53 AM on November 1

Pull all the professional reviews for albums you already love. The reviewer will compare your band to others - influences, soundalikes, derivatives. There's your new list to explore.
posted by Sfving at 6:14 PM on November 1

I find most new bands from friends involved in the indie scene, but I've had some great finds perusing Pitchfork and Metacritic's annual Top Album lists. Don't always agree with their rankings, but at least the reviews are well written and consider the context of the artist's previous body of work as well as the environment at the time of release.

Another way to find great bands: every artist includes a list of influences in the CD pamphlet or their website.

A third way: subscribe to your favorite bands' blogs. Artists frequently cite admiration for other up-and-coming bands. Phoenix, for instance, recently posted an awesome video where they listen to and discuss the "20 tracks that changed their lives."
posted by chalbe at 12:19 PM on November 2