SYMBM Discover New Music - Great Sites

SYMBM (Stuff You Might Be Missing) - Cure Your IPOD boredom edition. 

Tired of the same old stuff you've been listening to?  IPOD crying for something new and different?  Did you hear a great new song, and want to check out more stuff from that artist, but don't know where to go to give a listen?   Well, there is a plethora of ways to go about it.. and today I'm gonna tell you about a few of my favorite ways.  Illegal downloading from sites like Limewire aside, there are actual legal ways to be able to listen to stuff that are also fun and very, very useful. 

One of the simplest ways is to simply go to sites like YouTube.  First day on the internet? Then you may not know about YouTube.  Simply put, YouTube is a social networking site where people upload videos of ..pretty much anything under the sun.. and share with the world at large.  Other users can then comment on the uploads and/or copy the HTML code provided and embed the videos they want to share on other places on the web...thereby promoting and increasing the sharing. If you're looking for a video of a certain song, or maybe an old episode of Family Guy, or maybe Knots Landing, YouTube is the place to go.  it's useful for discovering new things, because they show you lists of related videos next to every video, which can then lead you to things you never heard before. 

Another way is to just go to Amazon.com, and type in the name of a song you like, or an artist's name, and it will bring up the information on the music by that artist, along with clips of the songs so you can listen to them, and also gives you recommendations based on your search of other artists or things you might like.  This also works for books and DVDs...Amazon is very useful for for lots and lots of things.  The downside is, you only get to hear clips, not the whole songs, but if you like what you hear, you can purchase the tracks or entire CD you like. 

One of the best and absolute most useful ways to find new stuff is through sites like last.fm.  This site is a really kewl and very easy way to find new music, and listen to the stuff you already know you like.  It is a social networking site that gives you a whole bunch of ways to find and enjoy music.  It's free to join, and it works pretty much like all other social networking sites. You can make a profile page, and as you listen to songs you like, you can add them to your playlist.  You can also connect to different users and can then keep in touch with them, and see what they've added to their playlists.  And you can write "journal" entries on songs or artists you like..or don't like.. why you like them, a review of the song or CD..or whatever you like.  You can also leave comments on the song or artist's pages.  People add tags to them too, and that gives you another way to find things you might enjoy.  Each artist's page lists the CDs they've made and the songs, and you can listen to them, and also links to videos of them.  They also list artists on the left-hand side of the page that you might also be interested in.  Some of the songs are full tracks, and some are only clips, but there are a lot of them that are full tracks.  Now, for the less than honest among you, not that I am in any way endorsing or recommending that anyone actually do this.. because it would be wrong! wrong! wrong!.. but if you like a song, you could either purchase it through Amazon.com, or you could utilize the nifty sound recorder on your computer, or if, like me, you have a sound card that has an MP3 recorder feature, you could play the song you like and record it with your sound recorder, save it to your hard drive, and then zip it right onto your IPOD.. but, that would be just wrong!!   That aside, last.fm is fun and very interesting, and can keep any music lover entertained for many, many hours.

This last site is one really, really cool site, and one I really love, called Musicovery.  It's not quite as useful as the others mentioned here, because it's more a web radio player than a sharing site. You can't search for songs by artist or anything, and it doesn't have a really huge variety of different artists or very much in the way of newer songs compared to sites like last.fm, but I still love it.  It features a music player that lets you "define the mood of the player", and choose the style of song you want to hear, and even the decade you want the song to be from if you like.  Depending on what you click on the player, it will pull up this really neat interface that has different songs from many different artists all connected to each other.  Click on a song and you can listen, or choose one of the similar songs it is connected to.  I've discovered a few new artists through this site, and it plays the whole song, not just clips.. along with new stuff, it has a lot of my favorite older songs. (See note re: sound recorder above).   If you decide to register on the site, the sign-up form is in French, which is kind of strange since everything on the site is in English, but its pretty standard and not too terribly hard to figure out.   There is one problem with this site though, some of the songs are mislabeled.  For instance, a song that says it's a Norah Jones song under the Jazz heading, is actually Dolly Parton.  There are a couple I've run across like this, but the majority are what they say they are. 

So, there ya have it, folks!  Hope this has helped you in your quest for some snappy new tunage to enjoy.