Where It’s At In Music Discovery

People talk about Pandora and Last.fm as if they are the holy grail of music discovery.

Bob Lefsetz moans the loss of FM radio and drives around in his car listening to XM play 20 year old music and thinks XM is where it’s at in digital music.

XM and Pandora are for the over 40 crowd who like their music spoon fed to them. They aren’t anywhere near where it’s at in music discovery.

If you want to know where it’s at in music discovery these days, you have to be on the mp3 blogs. Because that is where the next big act is going to be launched. Hell it has already happened. Take my beloved Arctic Monkeys who I found on the mp3 blogs last year. That’s where the people who really love new music do their thing.

And there’s a couple of hundred
Think they’re Christopher Columbus

That’s all it takes, a couple of a hundred blogs, to discover cool music. They post it and we discover it. And all we have to do is click on the link and hear the music. None of that bs 30 second sample stuff. You get the whole song on the mp3 blogs and you get it as much as you want.

And better yet, there’s an aggregator out there called The Hype Machine which culls all the mp3 blogs and serves up an aggregated playlist. It’s like delicious (link density matters) and you can get recent or popular or just one act or just one blog. And Hype Machine has its own player so you can do the spoon feed thing if you want.

I find so much great music on the mp3 blogs and the hype machine. Just last week I found a great band called TV on the Radio. I’ve been listening to them on Rhapsody and am going to buy the record.

What mp3 blogs do is combine the best of radio, music magazines, and the web into one ecosystem that works to surface interesting new music. If you want to dive into mp3 blogs, start with the HypeMachine and start listening and clicking on the links. You’ll be entering the future of music discovery.