Eight miles in the snow. Both ways.
I remember combing the racks at the old Sound Ex on Westheimer or Vinal Edge to see if Palace had a new record out.
I used to sit down in front of the wall of magazines at the Alabama Bookstop and read the reviews in Alternative Press.
Josh and I went to Cactus at midnight to buy Brighten the Corners. It totally sucked, and it felt like a kick in the belly, but we felt it at the same time.
I can’t count the number of times I stood tethered to a listening station trying to hear a new CD with of one good speaker.
I don’t do any of this stuff anymore, and I miss having that kind of time to kill. But despite the nostalgia I have for those college days in the Montrose, I think finding and listening to new music is a lot easier now. Certainly, I encounter a lot more of it. The reason, of course, is the Internet.
I don’t want to belabor the point, because I think everyone around my age experienced the same shift at around the same time. The advent of the Web and the post-Napster era of broadband means that we can subscribe to feeds instead of magazines. We can download craploads of music for orders of magnitude less than we used to pay—if we pay at all.
So yeah, you know all that.
I just wanted to take a few moments to share my personal music discovery workflow. This is how I get sounds:
Yeah, I’m a huge fan of paying less than 40 cents per download, but part of eMusic’s massive value is their commitment to top-notch editorial content. Their editors of the eMusic magazine review a ton of releases and supplement their reviews with features and interviews. They also have an employee blog that highlights new releases and hidden gems. But my favorite regular feature is the eMusic dozen, which collects 12 signature releases in a given category. For example, there are dozens devoted to labels (e.g., Southern Lord, Sun Records) and genres (More Essential Alt-Country, Scandinavian Jazz). Artists like Brit Daniel, Isaac Hayes, and Chuck D have also contributed their own compilations. Because eMusic is a subscription service and you lose the monthly downloads you don’t use, I’m constantly looking for new stuff. Fortunately, eMusic’s editors do a great job helping me discover new music and classic records I’d overlooked.
Last.fm is best known for its Scrobbler, a software program that keeps track of what you play on your computer and shares it with your friends. You can see my most recently played artists and songs below.
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But I think their Web radio service is underrated. Like Pandora, if you visit the Last.fm Web site and enter the name of a song or an artist, Last.fm will play similar tracks for you. You can also listen to a style or “tag,” such as light jazz or black metal, or to the personalized station for any user (e.g., mrshl, or willadams). Most often, I listen to the “My Recommendations” station, which selects tracks based on all the songs I’ve submitted to My Library via the scrobbler. As different songs play, Last.fm will show you crap loads of information about whatever’s playing, including artist bio and similar artists.
Unlike Pandora, last.fm doesn’t force you to visit their Web page and view their ads. You can access the site through their scrobbling software, which is available on Mac, Windows, Linux and iPhone.
Recently, though, I’ve started listening to Last.fm via the Fire.fm firefox add on, which remembers your past radio stations and lets you access them in the address bar. It’s perfect for work, where it lets me listen to millions of songs without having to plug in a hard drive.
Other sites and tools I use
Metacritic
Reviews of new releases collected from a wide swath of music sites, magazines, and papers.
Jango.com
Another Pandora-like site that I actually like better than Pandora. A lot more control over what you hear, plus a larger library of songs. It’s not pretty, though. Looks like MySpace.
HypeMachine
This site aggregates tracks and links from the most popular MP3 blogs around the Web. It’s got integrated Web radio, and it can sync with Twitter and Last.fm.
Pitchfork.tv
The dominant Web zine everyone loves to hate is still awfully useful, especially if you want to see high-quality videos, films, documentaries, and interviews. This spin-off site proves that the much-dissed site is putting their massive cache of ad dollars to good use.
Allmusic.com Blog
As if Allmusic weren’t already ridiculously useful, this year they started a blog, and it’s quickly become one of my favorite reads on the Web. They cover a lot of ground, and the lack of focus on a single genre or era of music makes it a particularly useful discovery tool.
Amazon MP3
I can’t stand iTunes, so Amazon was a welcome competitor. Lots and lots of high-bit rate, DRM-free music, and most of it is cheaper than iTunes. The lightweight downloading software will automatically add your music to iTunes or Windows Media Player.
MediaMonkey
Not a music discovery tool per se, but this is what I use on my PC instead of Winamp, iTunes, or Windows Media player. How good is it? I paid $34.95 for a lifetime license. It’s got features no other player has, and it can handle huge libraries of songs without freezing. Sadly, it’s Windows only.
8tracks
Recently, Muxtape (a site I wrote about here) was shut down by the RIAA. That sucks, but the newish 8tracks (review here) is a better alternative. Unlike Muxtape, 8tracks lets you create more than one mix. It also imports album art, and it allows you to add tracks from other users without having to upload them first. Recommended. Here’s my profile.
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From this list, you can probably tell that I’m not scouring the Web for the most obscure shit I can find. The sites and tools I mention above are wide nets that allow me to cover an awful lot of ground in a relatively short amount of time. That’s the point of this post, I guess.
When it comes to finding new music, I don’t work as hard as I used to. But I buy more music now. And I listen to more music. I’m not sure the music is as great as what I loved in 1995. I’m pretty sure it’s not. But I haven’t given up trying to find it.
11 Comments:
You've got some sites/apps on here I haven't used before, look interesting - so thanks I'll bookmark this page and use it as a reference for a while.
I'm an eMusic user and I believe Ramon is too. I like it and trust the reviewers as well although it's frustrating to forget to use all the points in a given month. Some months if I remember my points, but have nothing in the wish list, I'll let my fellow nappers' occasional reviews be the guide.
I dislike iAnything. The only time I use iTunes is if I've got a gift certificate but I still don't want to bother with it. I've had 20 bucks in my iTunes account since November. Pain in the butt to get stuff on my mp3 player since it's not an iSomethingorother.
Agree on Pandera - love the concept of the music genome but their library is small. I wonder though, where the music genome collectors would like to draw the line. I mean, there's so much music released now in so many categories.
I don't like iTunes and I can't stand Windows Media Player. I use foobar2000 (http://www.foobar2000.org). Unfortunately, it's Windows-only, but it's free and highly extensible & configurable.
Why y'all gotta be hatin' on the iTunes? I've used plenty of players and iTunes is as good as any and better than most. And I'm not sure why using iTunes would make it harder to put songs on your mp3 player, Wednesday. It stores them in a directory, just like all players do.
I think the biggest problem with iTunes is that it defaults to the .m4a format, which fucks people who think that they're making MP3s. I've been hit a couple times by this on re-installs, etc.
Of course, you can convert m4as to mp3s, but that's a second transcode.
Apart from that, iTunes is a bit logy managing my 200GB of music, but mostly fine for my purposes.
I liked iTunes before it got so bloated and slow. But I've never liked the way it arranges files (Artist\Album\XX Title) instead of the way it should be (according to Conor) (Artist - Album\XX - Title), to say nothing of its handling of compilations. Also, it won't let me have the sort columns set up like I want. Also, it only plays a few formats, not including FLAC files, which makes it pretty much useless for me.
Why can't we preview our comments anymore, BTW? Did Blogger just mess with things, or did someone alter the template?
iTunes is great if 1) You have an iPod and 2) You only get music from iTunes.
I have a Sansa mp3 player and I buy music from anywhere but iTunes. MediaMonkey can sync with just about any mp3 player (including an iPod) and it handles podcasts well. And MediaMonkey will monitor your folders for new music, without having to add it manually. MediaMonkey isn't the only player to have these features. It's sort of a minimum standard.
iTunes seems to be the only media player that won't find your music in selected folders.
I'm not sure why people bitch about that monitoring feature. I actually don't want iTunes to go out and randomly add files to its database that I don't want it to add. And I sure don't want the extra overhead of having another application doing constant indexing. Honestly, it's not really very hard to tell iTunes to add a file when you want it to be added.
iTunes lags like crazy on my laptop. I am reasonably happy with it though, enough that I wouldn't want to totally overhaul my media management just to speed things up. I might consider options when it comes down to formatting conversions.
Back in the day, I started using the paid emusic service when founding NAP member Ramon directed me there for my first NAP podcasts. I was currently using mp3stor.com which was fucking awesome and based out of Russia.. so it was part of the whole "you are illegally scoring your music" morality war, but I have yetto find a site that had so much of what i was looking for. The fact that emusic charges what it does and doesn't offer "rollover" downloads makes me hate them. The other thing that makes me hate them is that the "your new arrivals" music they choose for me based off of my downloads is ludicrous... and I wonder who the fuck is running that department.
The biggst issue that I have with emusic solely in comparison to other sites is that I am paying the same amount for each song, rather than paying for the song length. For example, "All" by the Descendents would cost me as much as "Purple Rain"... I would rather pay for the length and not a per song expense. Its a minor point, but one that irritates me about emusic.
As far as itunes... I hate it for reasons I can't explain. I hate it because I know there are other media organizers and players out there but I have no fucking time to figure that shit out. No time.
Pandora was good for me years ago for turning me onto music I hadn't heard in a similar genre and lastfm has been pretty great to me too... except whan I was trying to learn how to play Thin Lizzy's "Emerald" and it only let me listen to it three times....
8tracks isn't better for one reason: no Last.FM scrobbling.
The biggst issue that I have with emusic solely in comparison to other sites is that I am paying the same amount for each song, rather than paying for the song length.
But Unspeakable that is one of my favorite features. You constantly have to grapple with the old bigger-isn't-always-better lesson (that I learned the hard way in kindergarten).
I'm always looking at new albums thinking hmmm do I get the 8 minute song or the 2 minute song. It's a gamble but there's a bit of an art to it too.
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