How do you find new music: Google, YouTube, Allmusic.com?

Well, it’s Sunday night and time for some “off topic” musings. As you probably know I have a bit of a thing for music. One of the problems I have is that liking a broad range of music makes it more and more difficult to keep up to date with new and exciting music.

The internet has certainly been a boon for music, with many artists simply communicating with their audience directly, but it has also made the process of finding new music that you like much more difficult. There’s a vast flood of music available through YouTube, MySpace etc, but the very volume of material just makes it harder and harder to find the good stuff (or at least the stuff we like).

I did a little research tonight and found in the first couple of pages of a Google search over 30 well regarded music serving sites that expose visitors to new music. The thing about that was that they all had a different music bias, which is fine if that’s the extent of your listening range but if you like a lot of different genres then you are faced again with long hours trawling through all these sites. “Back in the day”, this “search” function was largely provided by record stores, where the staff would get to know your tastes and recommend artists and albums you might like. Unfortunately it’s becoming rare to find that sort of service. (I’m lucky that So Music in Newtown is still one of those stores that cares about the music and their customers).

There have been some attempts to provide a technical solution to the recommendation conundrum, the best of these has been Pandora, a project started in 2006 that does a detailed analysis of a huge library of music and has the ability to match an individual’s likes and dislikes when serving music. Unfortunately, after a worldwide release, ongoing licencing issues have restricted Pandora to US use only.

There’s no doubt that services such as these will gain in popularity as the need to filter and recommend appropriate music continues to grow along with the growth of online music sources. In the meantime, the older record store model will continue to have a place in the overall scheme of things and we will also see a growing number of writers publishing music blogs as an online alternative to the human conversation of the record store.

So how do you find new music?