How do you find new music ??

I listen to 6music (BBC) via the web at work. You get a good range of pop/rock stuff played here, both old and new.

The quality over the web isn't great - I believe that there is a Psion thingy that you can plug in to your PC to take the broadcasts off air. The quality of this is supposed to be much better. I think it costs about £100.

Nick

I often look at who participated in the making of recordings that I like, e.g. producers, engineers, backing vocalists. I then search cdnow.com or allmusic.com to see what else they've done. Discovered quite a bit of new music that way.

Thomas

In my student daze it was easy, the uni was a hot-bed of punks/new wavers/soul boys/goths/rude boys/3rd generation mods etc. Music was a passion and a badge of honour. Records were bought on the first day of release and shared with friends.

The NME and John Peel were essential reading/listening. Live gigs every week (on good weeks several times a week).

John Peel was doing the voice over on a docu-soap about council drain cleaners last night!

Today?

XFM occasionally play some good stuff between the adverts and inane DJ 'banter' and worse phone ins.

Amazon do a recomendations thing based on your purchasing history and wish list. This seems to use the stuff that other poeple bought when they bought the lps/cds on your list. This can come up with some strange ones (presumably bought as presents unless they've got very broad tastes - people who bought Joy Division also bought CDs by Cliff) but can yield the odd gem worth investigating.

I have recently bought the hefty volume that is 'Mojo's Best Albums of All Time' which instead of the usual reviews gives the background stories of the making of a thousand or so classic albums. Reading this I started folding the corners over on pages about albums with an interesting story/band lineup etc and eventually wrote a list to take on increasingly expensive shopping trips.

I would have previously said I had a wide taste in music but now I've (thankfully) found loads of great albums and bands which would otherwise have passed me by.

Funkadelic, Laura Nyro, The Stooges, DJ Shadow and RL Burnside are now my friends

Jonathan

Wire magazine always has many reviews of a wide variety of things (and some of the better writing among the review mags, imo).

www.allmusic.com, as Dutch said, is good for quick reviews and lots of links to related music.

www.pitchforkmedia.com has reviews of a lot of indpendent-label stuff. The review and writing quality is very uneven.

www.insound.com review some things themselves, and also have staff picks that I've found helpful.

Wire is by far the best of these, quality-wise. The others are all free, so I guess you get what you pay for

As per the last posting. I think Magirus means the Bob Harris show from 10pm to 1am on Radio 2.

I've made many new discoveries there.

My other source is a great circle of Hi-Fi/music loving friends.

1) The Wire magazine: lots of articles and reviews, plus free compilation cds/label samplers. Some great stuff in recent cds - Rune Grammofon and Staubgold label samplers, Wire Tapper series

2) Label compilations or samplers: usually cheap and introduce you to a number of new bands. Two of my albums of the last year fall into this category: Swim Team #2 on ~Swim, and Putting the Morr Back in Morrisey on Morr Music.

3) Find a great album then go for the 'Buy everything on the label' approach (NB don't try this if your last fave was on Sony). My latest attempts at this are the Toytronic and Morr Music labels (highly recommended for electronica fans).

4) Internet newsgroups and websites eg (again for electronica, http://www.themilkfactory.co.uk/

cheers
Lee

R3 is my current main source of inspiration, with Late Junction especially good, but there are plenty of other good shows on various stations.

But to be honest I tend to listen to the nat more than the CD player and turntable. Link a good tuner to a decent aeriel and you'll have more music than you know what to do with.

Pete.

I find that Amazon is a good site for finding new music. If you type in artists that you like it recommends stuff that is similar. Also most of the albums listed allow you to hear excerpts .

Another method is to dig out all those albums you thought were crap and give them another chance.

That's how I rediscovered such gems as Hooverphonic's "Blue Wonder Powder Milk", Nine Ince Nails' "Downward Spiral", and that Metallica LP amongst other things.

Hey, free (and legal) music!

Stereolab and St. Etienne were still crap.

Join the mailing lists of shops / web sites that do the genres I like (Carbon disks, Smallfish, Sister Ray, Electrolux, etc.)

Go into record shops find the records with interesting covers and buy them or listen to them first if you can.

Ask the moody record shop assistants "If I like this xxxxxxx, what else do you think I will like?

Watch MTV, MTV2, The Box etc.

Read the Wire

DS

OTR - "The Archers"

Only one week before the Proms start

duncan

Do not forget Classic FM - it has introduced me to several new pieces over the years - it also has a audio stream and the web site has the play list so it is relatively easy to source the music.

PS Classic FM also has the disadvantage of thinking that anything that it is played with an orchestral instrument is clasical music. So you have to be tolerant of their dumbing down activities, ie todays top x etc.

Derek

Well, thanks for so many replies - I am surprised that so few of you get inspiration from magazine freebies or reviews - I can't get any radio where I am, so that's out for me, and I tend to pore over reviews and have bought lots of music from cover mounted cd's.
I also, when in England, where I can access the forum, spend time looking at the music room - trouble is, you just don't know who to trust in there....
So, what good music have I recently bought - the Archive cd is brilliant, Kid Loco, Little Axe (filed under reggae in HMV for some bizarre reason..)Richard Hawley, David Mead - all well worth the money, and all chosen by my "usual sources"

Cheers,

Steve

I decided to get a subscription of this magazine, based upon the recommendations here on the forum. It does have a bunch of neat stuff in it. However, the writing style is laughable. It seems as if a bunch of english majors are sitting around trying to see who can sound more obscure and elaborate. At times it verges on gobbledygook.

-=> Mike Hanson <=-

I was going to make send in a post about BBC Radio. As the others have said if you can get it on the net, you can listen to a number of shows on when you want to.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/, then select listen now, you will have to down load a realone player and then you get to the below and can select by station or by genre.

Many of the shows give play lists and you can wind stop or pause or wind on by 15 mins.
As has already been said, the quality is not hi-fi but most of the shows I want to listen to are usually on when I am in bed.
There should be something in there for everyone even if you only want to listen to the top 100 or whatever it is they play on R1 and of course if you can, you can always listen on your NAT01s if you live in the UK,

CNC

What seems to happen with me is I will get recommended something, I will like it then I will buy up stuff by the same or in the same genre.

for instance blues. It started with Eric Claptons Box set I got for a fiver. I liked the blues stuff.

asked for reccomendations. got them, then got more by the same artists and on it goes.

Its a bit like tree roots, always sprouting new ideas and threads which need investigation.

The Virgin All time greatest 1000 albums ever.

Book by ???? Lawton (Richard I think)

Anyway this is just a poll of polls type thing over the previous 2/3 years (gets reissued every 2/3 years). The good thing is its a range of Critics polls and readers polls both UK and USA so theres a fair range. Of couse you wont agree with much of it and the review are brief, but it has been a great source for me over the past couple of years.