The 3 Ingenious Ways to Find Incredible Music

Where’s the first place you look for new music?

The internet? But Google’s top man Eric Schmidt once said that there are 5 million terabytes of data on the internet. By our very scientific analysis, that translates to a bajillion of your favourite MP3s. And Schmidt’s estimate was back in 2005.

Of course, the internet’s data isn’t all music. But with all that unwanted information crashing around you, you might feel a bit swamped.

So let’s show you the way out of this data quagmire and into more fun music:

Make lists of publications

Okay, there’s a small workload. Luckily, the perfect time to do this is while you’re studying, because it’ll be harder to find the time after you graduate.

So when you find a new blog, website, or magazine, have a look at the albums it recommends. Now you have two options.

Say you notice the taste of the magazine aligns with yours. Now add it to a list, and check back regularly.

Or say the magazine’s taste is different from yours. You don’t really recognise any of the tracks. You don’t know the artists’ names in the best of section. In this case, what you have to do is simply listen to the recommended albums to see if you like the sound. Try about ten albums before you make a call. If you like it, add it to a list.

Shazam your real life

Everyone comes across new music in their daily life, but almost no-one keeps a record of what they find. Which is strange when you think about how many opportunities there are to find new music.

It doesn’t matter where you are: at the shops, visiting your friends, in the club. Music is everywhere; you just have to listen closely. Or so they say.  But does that really help you to remember and research the tracks?

Nope. Not really. So download an app like Shazam, which listens to the music playing wherever you are and identifies the song for you. Once it recognises the track, you can save it to a list and check it out again later on.

Unfortunately, Shazam won’t work for tracks like random bootlegs recorded by the small indie band the Madeups, who only ever put out a limited run of 100 singles to distribute among friends. However for most music, even stuff that’s fairly obscure, it hits the mark.

Leave your comfort zone

You need to get out of your musical comfort zone. Say you’re stuck to the soft leather sofa of 50s Jazz, maybe it’s time to move to the plush bean bag of 60s pop?

Silly furniture analogies to the side, you get the point. Sometimes it’s too easy to stay with one style. One way to get out of this is with the radio. So here are a couple of ideas:

Normal or digital radio: one day, listen to a new radio station for an hour, the next day listen to the station above that one, again for an hour, and so on and so on.

Online stations: websites like last.fm and apps like Spotify allow you to browse at random. If you’re looking for new places to stream music, lots of blogs already have this subject covered.

Sing Your Own Tune

Finding new music never stops. Artists keep producing new music. New scenes come and go. Old genres are rediscovered and become interesting. Your own personal tastes change.

But the methods we’ve just talked about will give you a little bit more control over the flow of the music, and they’ll help you to keep the process of finding new tunes exciting.