Friends, internet radio (KEXP and WOXY), Pandora, allmusic.com, the Sound Opinions radio show (a local weekly program on public radio), and message boards.
Wait, this deserves to be highlighted because I can’t believe it took 19 posts for someone to mention it.
Not a day goes by where I don’t find a dozen bands/solo artists to OOOAAAHHH!! over. Click on “Music” in the top right, put a band you like’s name into the Search and start from there. People usually put their favorites in their “Top 8” and like usually likes like. In other words, you find a band that’s grunge rock, chances are some or all of the bands in their Top 8 are other grunge rock bands (along with maybe the lead singer’s girlfriend and their best bud). Most of the bands have music on their pages, and they can have up to 4 songs. Listen to one or two songs, if you don’t like what you hear, move on. If you like what you hear, listen to them all. If you REALLY like what you hear, you can go to the band’s web site and hear some more or maybe buy a CD.
Check the Comments area too, because a lot of times bands will leave Comments and you can click through from there.
This wouldn’t be up your alley, but I maintain a MySpace page for one of my favorite artists, and people know that if they go to most of the bands/artists in “her” Top…whatever (I cheat because I use code that lets me have more than 8 on the front page), they’ll hear music that, well, I like, not her. I only request adds from bands/solo artists, never individuals or commercial entities (on the particular page anyway), so 98% of “her” Friends list consists of other musicians. I LOVE trawling MySpace, listening to all kinds of music and requesting adds. My tastes are very eclectic, and I want the Friends list to be very eclectic, so I request adds from bands/solo artists of all genres.
If there’s a genre you love, it’s going to have a presence on MySpace. Part of the fun is finding it. I love finding little enclaves, and branching out from there. I’ll notice someone who looks interesting on someone’s list, and click through to their profile, and find it’s a shoegaze band from Warsaw. In their Friends list are other bands, not all necessarily shoegaze, from Warsaw or other towns in Poland. In one of them I’ll find a band that turns out to be a trance band from Mexico City, and in their Friends list are other trance bands from Mexico City. In one of those Friends list I’ll find traditional singers from Mexico. In one of those Friends lists I’ll find traditional singers from Central and South America. In one of those Friends list I’ll find fado singers from Spain. In one of those Friends list I’ll find jazz musicians from Portugal. In one of those Friends list I’ll find experimental musicians from Dublin. In one of those Friends list I’ll find traditional musicians from Ireland. It just goes on and on and on, looping around the world, in and out of genres. I’ve sent whole days doing nothing but listening to music genres I’ve never really gotten into before, like NuLounge or Downtempo or Breakbeats. MySpace is definitely addictive for people who love music. The more types of music you’re willing to tastetest the more fun it is.
MySpace may be owned by the devil himself, but that doesn’t negate the fact that it’s STUFFED with really good music, there for the click of a mouse.
Just be sure to run Ad-Aware SE and Ewido (they’re free) every couple of days. The one BIG drawback with MySpace is that it clogs your computer up with adware. I never ever ever ever EVER click on any of the ads and yet I still frequently get to the point where my computer runs so slow I can click on something and go make a sandwich while I’m waiting (and I won’t even be on the Straight Dope!) so I have to run those programs often, and reboot. I pity the MySpace users who don’t know about the free adware-killing programs. I especially pity the 14 year old girls who constantly play those stupid “games” like ‘KISS GEORGE CLOONEY!’ or ‘CATCH THE BABY!’ because I can’t even imagine what’s going on underneath all that “fun.” More to the point, I pity their parents, who then have to find a computer geek to take care of the problem, or even worse take the computer in to be serviced! My husband cleans out ad/spyware from computers ALL THE TIME for friends, and he says he’s known people who have actually thrown their computers away because they were so clogged up! We could start a business: “Spyware Killers!” and use the Ghostbusters’ theme “who ya gonna call?” because it’s just going to get worse until there’s a mass rebellion among computer users.
Ah well, a rant for another time. It would be sending a message NOT to use MySpace, but I would miss it too much. Such a dilemma.
I’m pretty sure you meant to type six posts 
And I’ve never had any problem with spyware on MySpace - maybe you just need to use Firefox?
Oh my, you’re right. I saw all those truncated URLs of BBC shows and my eyes glazed over. My brain assumed that the next thing you’d mention had to do with the truncated URLs, so I skipped down to the next message. I should have read closer.
But now that I read it, we’re definitely not visiting the same pages. I can go for days and not hear any “rubbish” at all. Not that there isn’t any, but maybe I’ve just been lucky, because it’s been rare for me.
Oh god, people telling other people they need to use Firefox is getting almost as annoying as people who tell other people they should use Macs. Nothing personal toward you, it’s just that I don’t want to use another browser. I want the ad/spyware problem cleaned up and off the Internet.
So telling people to use Firefox is bad, but telling people to use IE and AdAware is good? 
I didn’t tell anybody to use IE, but yeah, I did mention AdAware.
Ooops, posted too soon. Most people use IE, and most people AREN’T going to go switching browsers. It makes sense to recommend programs to help clean out ad/spyware because it’s easier to install and run a program than it is to completely switch browsers.
Even if I thought I wanted to switch (which I don’t), it’s a headache to even think about. I have hundreds of Favorites, what will happen to them? Will I be able to see pages tweaked for IE in Firefox? What CAN’T I do with Firefox that I’m used to doing with IE that Firefox users don’t mention because they’re pushing the browser so hard and don’t want to turn people off? (Sorta like how Mac users kinda forget to mention all the things you CAN’T do with a Mac that you can easily do with a PC).
I’m trying not to turn this into a browser-war hijack, so I’ll be brief. Favourites are imported automatically. There’s an extension called IE Tab which provides a button to click if you encounter an IE-specific page, which reloads the page using the IE engine (within Firefox). And my mother managed to install Firefox herself, despite being a person who still calls both CDs and USB drives ‘floppies’.
I don’t want to hijack either, especially over a browser that I have no intention of ever using. Whatever people use, IE/Firefox/Opera/Netscape/Mozilla/etc, check out MySpace for music.
my last couple purchases were based on stuff I heard on NPR (Fiona Ritchie’s Thistle and Shamrock) and World Music - a show on Link TV.
I’m a little surprised that Rolling Stone wasn’t mentioned with the other magazines … is it not taken seriously in the music biz? Am I a dork for subscribing to it but no other music mags?
Anyway, that’s where I discover some of my new music. I’ll read a review, and if the music sounds like my thing I’ll follow up online. I’ll admit to some frustration with RS’s seeming hip-hop bias: seems like every time they have a “best new singles” or “best new artists” list, only one or two are outside of the hip-hop/rap/R&B genres. Those are three of the few genres I don’t care for. But I’ve gotten some good music recs there (like Funeral for a Friend), and I also use it for “under the radar” DVD recs.
I do still discover new artists on the local radio (Fall Out Boy, The Killers, OAR, etc.), but I also rely on internet stations (I purchased and downloaded KT Tunstall’s album from a UK site well before her name was ever mentioned in the States).
It took me until just this second to track her down, and if the host hadn’t described her as “Jean-Luc Hendrix,” I wouldn’t have done it at all. Her name is Caryn Lin, and there are just too many ways to spell both of those names.
Magazines tend to be pretty genre-specific, so unless someone’s a fan of that genre, they probably won’t be interested in it. It’s been a while since I read an issue of Rolling Stone, but they always seemed pretty mainstream to me, and that’s never going to fly with the music geeks.
To find new music I try to trace back the influences of bands I like. Guns & Roses & Metallica both covered Misfits songs, so that got me into The Misfits. The Ramones followed along in the same general genre, and bands like Black Flag came from The Misfits.
I’ve found that band profiles on Wikipedia often have a lot of good history/influences information. Some Amazon.com reviews have some good information too.
As for “here and now” bands, MySpace is pretty darn good. Big variety of free samples and linkage.
One correction, I didn’t mean to suggest Black Flag “came from” The Misfits, I just mean while listening to a live Misfits song, Glen Danzig said something like “Here’s Henry from Black Flag”, so that got me into them too.
www.allmusic.com gives a pretty good listing of music by band, genre, etc.
For the most part, since I’m in my 30s, my only passive exposure to new music is whatever is on the radio (which I never listen to since I don’t drive) or in a tv show or movie. It’s not like in high school or college where you are around peers who sit around playing music all day on their stereo/computer.
The best radio station for new music (IMHO one of the best out there) is BBC 6 Music…
I use the music channels on cable a lot. If I’m in the mood for X kind of music, I’ll punch it up, and if something causes my ears to perk up, I listen a little closer and if I dig it, then I write it down for future perusal at Tower Records.
Speaking of Tower, I look at all the indy music mags and lots of them come with sampler CD’s. This is another good way to get into new things that are in the style that you like.
I miss the old Musician magazine for a number of reasons, one of which is that I loved their annual new music sampler (called A Little on the CD Side). I have about 7 of them, and they were, indeed, great sources for discovering new artists.
I’ve found an excellent site for “People who listen to X also listen to Y” is Last.fm. You can make a profile (that involves installing a plug-in to your player, they support WinAmp, WMP, YME and several others) for it to make recommendations specifically for you, but even just going to artist pages on the site will give you similar artists. It also has a radio that you can use to listen to band sound-alikes or genres.