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FM radio, mostly college stations. I thought 9/11 changed everything. The only thing the Internet has changed is mail order. It's easier to get bad stuff cheap.
Finding new music used to be easy: listen to the radio or find a talkative clerk at the local record store. Now that the Internet has changed everything, how do you find new music?
Radio, but I keep listening more and more to the classical stations. Most of FM has become a constant stream of ads or else corporate music I have heard 1000 times. I guess I am now (40+) finding "new" music with the radio again. Can't say I have ever heard anything less than pretty good so far on the classical stations, and the background is educational, too. And another worm turns. Classical returns.
Now that the Internet has changed everything—and now it couldn't be easier! Music used to be so hard to find back when you had FM radio and that was about it. Now there's Internet radio, Internet forums, magazines, suggestions from Last.FM, iTunes, et al. Life is great. Music is plentiful.
TV. On the digital stations, there are music channels. The sound is not good, even hooked up to the stereo, but it's good enough to tell. Also, festivals. Went to the Beantown Jazz Festival Saturday and bought two CDs of one of the performers I had never heard of.
LastFM is an amazing source of new music that makes Apples Genius look like the village idiot. Team that up with Napster and for $13/month for both services you will never want for new music again. This is a brilliant way to try before you buy a CD. Yes, I still buy CDs, I just don't buy any more bad ones.
New music is no more difficult to find that it used to be. In fact it's easier. Bypass the radio or that talkative clerk and check out music services such as iTunes. I wouldn't buy anything there, but it's a great way to find new music. Just type in some music that you do like, then simply look at the other music that the same people bought.
I don't listen to the radio, except when I hear it when shopping. There is a lot of ordinary sounding music, although sometimes it's cheap radios that make the music sound boring. It's not often I hear a really good song. It has to move me so to speak. Movies include a good song once in a while (eg, the end of Ghost Rider).
I get my new music from several places. I still like to read reviews in the magazines like Stereophile. I also love listening to Rhapsody and Pandora online through a Sonos system hooked to my main audio system. With millions of tracks available, they have more music than I can ever haope to listen to! Last, nothing beats swapping music with friends with similar and (sometimes even better) different musical tastes.
Thirty years ago, the only music we could buy was what was physically (LP or cassette) available in the store. iTunes and MySpace have so many titles available, it would be interesting to evaluate what space would be needed to carry all of this content on vinyl. I'd guess well over 100,000 square feet.
Visit my local indie record store, Criminal Records, in Atlanta. Those guys are accelerated music geeks who know everything. As well, I go to ThinkIndie.com and listen to snippets of stuff that has been picked out by indie store staff from shops that are part of the coalition.