I’ll qualify for 40 in a few months and I rarely find new music on commercial radio (and also fairly rarely on college radio as well.) In fact, tied with those two methods has been typing in names that I would think would make good band names into Google, some of which turn out to be actual decent bands.
But mostly I find new music these days from Amazon recommendations and going to concerts and hearing the other bands there.
50 year old here -
Daft Punk
LCD Soundsystem (Yeah, I know they are done, but they still qualify, right?)
Arctic Monkeys
The Last Shadow Puppets
The Hold Steady
The Whitest Boy Alive
Fleet Foxes
Shovels and Rope
Adele
Wilco (not sure if they really count since they’ve been around for a while.)
That’s just off the top of my head; I’m sure there are more but those are representative of what new music I’ve been listening to lately. I’m not a fan of hip hop and I don’t really care for most of the performers who are on top of the charts.
To answer the question, I like new music but most of the new music I like these days is posthardcore, which is too close to the numetal music of the early 2000s which I hated for me to fully embrace. Current posthardcore takes the screaming and the slightly grungy production of numetal and combines it with a little melodicity and rhythm of scene-influenced dance-emo.
Its signature is a mixture between clean and growly singing in the same song, sometimes putting so much of an emphasis on it that they have two singers, one for each style. Which is good because they not only can use the interplay between the singing styles as an art form, but I also wouldnt be able to stand growly singing for an entire song.
There is awesome contemporary music and there is shit. Contemporary artists like Pink Martini, AM60, Corinne Bailey Rae, Foo Fighters, Plain White T’s, Modest Mouse, The Strokes (to name a few) produce some excellent stuff.
Can’t stand rap but mostly can’t stand the ‘look at me’ attitude of some contemporary artists and especially the ones who think they are the first to do something; tattoos and piercings do not make you cool, nor good.
Reading that post was like listening to an art critic “explain” a piece of art to me. I know what all those words mean, but not really so much when you string 'em all together in that order.
So, could you give a couple examples of bands that you consider to be posthardcore, please? Because then I could go listen and then your descriptions might make a bit of sense to me. Thanks.
I knew that “melodicity and rhythm of scene-influenced dance-emo” could come off as that but the rest of it, I didn’t know.
Some past posthardcore bands: Circa Survive, Envy on the Coast (neither of which are as keyboard-oriented as modern posthardcore.)
Modern ones: Set It Off, Famous Last Words, Pierce the Veil.
I’m 50, with teenage kids and I am happier to listen to the station they like (91X in San Diego) than I am to listen to the interchangeable divas on the top-40 stations.
I am partial to:
Florence and the Machine
Mumford and Sons
Black Keys
Coldplay
Daft Punk
Noel Gallagher
and a few others.
College radio can be your friend, as there are often twenty different shows in the course of a week, each representing a different kind of music. Depending on where you live, it’s not always college kids running the mic either, some folks are in their Sixties.
Public radio can be good if there is a lot of local programming but that seems to be a rarity these days. It’s also more likely to concentrate on esoteric genres like world music and bebop than current genres like electronica.
There are simply too many podcasts on the web for me to even step into that argument. If you seek to learn more about a specific genre, you may be able to marrow things down on the web. I’m partial to Radio Free Song Club. They’re a group of moderately well-known 80s/90s singer/songwriters whose moment in the spotlight has passed.
If you just love listening to music, does it have to be new music? Would you consider tackling a formerly unknown genre like jazz, blues, Brazilian or classical? Maybe you want to finally give prog-rock a chance? There’s something new that the kids call Americana that sounds a lot like the old Seventies singer-songwriters to me.
I’ve mostly tired of rock. As someone said, it often sounds like retreads of stuff that I heard thirty years ago. But I’ve become very interested in 80s/90s music from Africa and 60s/70s jazz. I’ve taken a minor interest in country music, working my way from the 60s upward. Some of it it similar to familiar music like the Eagles while other songs remind me of why I ignored it for so long. I favor country from Texas over that from Nashville.
I’m 51 and I think there’s plenty of good music being made by new artists nowadays. But I have to search for it.
I’m 48 and don’t really listen to too much modern music these days, but I do like Lady Gaga, Adele, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Trans-Siberian Orchestra, some stuff from Deadmau5, some Marilyn Manson, a lot of industrial/EBM bands (Assemblage 23, Wolfsheim, Beborn Beton, Funkervogt, And One, Covenant, Seabound, VNV Nation). I don’t know how much of that qualifies as “new” anymore, though. 
I still kinda think of Nirvana and Pearl Jam as new. 
I don’t like hip-hop and rap much, nor do I like new-style country (I like the old-fogey stuff my parents used to listen to). Mostly I listen to older stuff, though: Rush, Alan Parsons, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, Peter Gabriel, Alice Cooper, etc.
I’m 53 and listen to a lot of new music, just very little that would show up on Top 40 radio. One of the local public radio stations is WXPN, and when I’m in the car that’s what I’m listening to >90% of the time. That’s where I hear the majority of new music.
Here are some recent newish discs I’ve bought:
Nataly Dawn - How I Knew Her
Atoms for Peace - Amok
Bat for Lashes - The Haunted Man
Local Natives - Hummingbird
Ra Ra Riot - Beta Love
Best Coast - The Only Place
Ellie Goulding - Halcyon
Dr. Dog - Takers and Leavers
David Byrne & St. Vincent - Love This Giant
Michael Kiwanuka - Home Again
Divine Fits - A Thing Called Divine Fits
Dirty Projectors - Swing Lo Magellan
Alabama Shakes - Boys & Girls
Sharon van Etten - Tramp
The Black Keys - El Camino
I listen to Jango while surfing the net and keep a list on my laptop’s desktop of bands and songs that catch my ear. I set the channel to “medium variety” and am, like vislor, happy with the selection it provides. About 3/4 is stuff I hadn’t heard before, so ones that stand out get added to the list. This way I always have a current list of new music (to me) to download for a long car trip when I’m away from the internet.
The free Shazam Droid app has snagged me a few new bands to check out. Just open the app whenever I’m wondering “who is this?” If the phone can get a clean enough sample it’ll show me everything about the track. It’s worked in noisy restaurants and bars, but only on recorded tracks that it can compare against a database, obviously.
Neither are new artists, but this “pitched up” version of Daft Punk’s latest is excellent. They added in some Michael Jackson yelps and I like it more that the original version. Full Daft Punk album drops May 21st.
Thanks, I’ll check some of those out.
Note: I actually looked up “melodicity” and I don’t think it’s a word. There was no definition of it. I think you meant “melody” but I’m not sure. Regardless, I have a new (to me) genre to explore. Thanks for the recommendations!
I’m past fifty (well past) and can credit many of the people on this Board with turning me on to new music. Two that come to mind are Metric and Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
48 here and I like most of the bands already mentioned (that I heard of) except Mumford. Can’t stand them. I’d like to add two that haven’t been mentioned: John Legend and Pomplamoose.
Big shout out!
I am 40 and I find that I listen to more pop music now than I ever did when I was a teen or in my 20s (I was much more into Rock back then).
I’m 45. I grew up in the 1980s and listened to early hard rock and heavy metal. I still like the stuff.
I have a fairly extensive CD collection, and I think the newest album I have was made in 1988. I have not heard *anything *over the past 25 years that has interested me. It all sounds so boring.
41 and hell yes! There is more great music being made now than ever before. I don’t go in for the Top 40 stuff, but thanks to the plethora of new music podcasts, my tastes have never been more diverse.
I’m going on 42, play guitar in a couple of bands, and co-founder of an internet radio station. There’s DEFINITELY good music out there. Currently, the music scene here in the southwest is blowing up with great artists and new venues opening. Here’s just a view I’ve discovered in the last couple of years:
Hunter Johnson
The Breakup Society
Mergence
Dry River Yacht Club
iamwe
Tony Martinez
The Love Me Nots
This Holy House
Swampbird
And most of these artists are played on my aforementioned radio station: Dust Circuit Radio. I’m no longer involved with it (just got too busy), but it’s going strong and growing fast. A great place to discover new roots-based Americana.
You’re suffering from recall bias. Don’t forget that the same band who did Life in the Fast Lane also did Heartache Tonight. If your memory of all those old songs were wiped, and you got magically transported back to 1979 and heard Heartache Tonight on the radio, you’d have to think that surely you had arrived at the all-time low of music.
I’m 51 and although I still enjoy the best of the olden days, I think music in general is as vibrant and alive as it’s ever been. On the other hand, we’ll probably never see anything I enjoy as much as Steely Dan.