Music discovery

I mostly listen to Pandora. I used to listen to Sirius and I enjoyed that, but my radio broke and I've yet to replace it. Sirius used to (maybe still does) have a lot shows djed by people like Bob Dylan and Tom Petty, Little Steven Van Zandt and Nancy Sinatra, and I really enjoyed listening to what they enjoy listening to. If you couldn't have guessed, their tastes are eclectic, and Bob Dylan for eg (not surprisingly) is a music encyclopedia and turned me on to lots of stuff I wasn't aware of, Mississippi John Hurt for example.

Listening to Pandora of course you have more control over what you hear because your prompting the playlist, but because my little speaker (Big Jambox) is usually in a different room than my laptop, I often don't know whom I'm listening to. I have found some new (to me anyway) artists on Pandora, and I've probably more often found stuff by people I'd been aware of but hadn't heard that particular thing before. I've gained more respect for example for artists like Sade, Aliyah, Boz Scaggs, Diana Krall, Sting, Shelly Berg Trio, etc. Sometimes I hear something and have to go in search of my laptop to find out who the artist is. There are times when it's no one I'd ever heard of- next time that happens, I'll try to link them on this thread.

Almost all the new stuff I discovered in the last two years or so came via Bandcamp. It's a service directed at artists, and it's up to them how much they allow.

Mostly, you can stream everything for free and if you like it, buy straight from the streaming page, either as a download or, if they have it, as CD, Vinyl or tape, whatever they have. Some musicians there are really creative about packaging. Like, The All-Abouts' Suburban Heart comes with a PDF comic book, or Dirk Darmstaedter's latest album ships with an extra EP. (Dirk isn't a new discovery, actually. I found a lot of old favorites there, too.)

Feel free to browse my collection for pointers, or just browse the site by genre.

They host spoken word stuff there, too. I've been thinking of hosting the audio commentary to my first comic album there and enable album sales through it. But mostly for the hosting.

An older service similar to Bandcamp is Jamendo. I prefer Bancamp because the Jamendo player keeps playing albums on auto-repeat if you don't tend to it all the time - very annoying. Better genrebrowsing, though.

For my more mainstream explorations, I use Deezer, which is pretty much the French equivalent of Spotify, the site that made Taylor Swift so angry recently because they don't pay artists much. (She fell for a common fallacy there, much like David Byrne and a lot of other people before her: Compared to record sales, the pay sucks, but it was never supposed to replace record sales. It's an alternative to illegal downloading. And it pays somewhat like radio airplay, except one stream doesn't go out to thousands of listeners, just one, so the fee for it is much smaller.) But I don't browse much there. It's where I go to check out new stuff I'm already aware of.

Spotify's free plan comes with unlimited streaming, but you get very annoying advertisments between songs. Deezer's free plan allows for two hours a month, but at least that's ad-free.

I use Soundcloud quite a bit. I use Youtube to discover older acts, although it can get sparser the more obscure you get (trying to find more than one track of Patti Schmidt's band Pest 5000 is disappointing.) I like Soundcloud and Mixcloud because they have a specialty in electronic music (a given since they were started by Berlin artists.)

Hey, I liked that, Maryn. Two guys who've recently caught my ear are Gary Clark, Jr. and Ed Sheerhan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wihWcdffBg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vN39UWJ8IVk

Heh, my favourite Ed Sheeran song. Not much of a fan of Ed Sheeran but this is fun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw-vrHKmGMI

Yeah, he's a talented guy, I think. Came across this recently from Renee Olstead, who may have been (is?) an actress, but she's got a way...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjGHlN-msAA

This is a couple years old, but I don't think I've ever heard this great song sung with more feeling. In memoriam of a friend's death, as it turns out, so there you go. I won't try to spell this guy's name, let along pronounce it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BM_JMacdfA

I love Spotify and use it to check out new stuff (and new-to-me stuff) all the time. I have a couple of online groups of like-minded music fans who know my tastes and suggest stuff I might like. A person who does this for me IRL is my guitar teacher (he introduced me to Nick Drake *faints*).

The newest thing in heavy rotation with me is The Amazing's new album, Picture You. Check this out.