We all can navigate our way around Youtube, blogs, Spotify and sites like Last.FM by now but what other sites can help you find your new favourite band? Digital looks at ten others you should know…
1. Soundcloud – It started as a highly intuitive way for bands and labels to share music with others. Thanks to its lightning fast speed and visual waveform interface, Soundcloud has become the place to catch the latest new tracks, particularly in dance and electronic circles. Try out http://player.thejackplug.com as it shows you the most popular tracks on Soundcloud.com.
2. Tuneglue – An expandable interactive spider diagram that helps you find related artists to who you search for. It’s extremely accurate and is essentially a cool visualisation of the musical landscape and its interconnectedness.
3. Grooveshark – It seems to be operating in a legal grey area but its popularity is not in question. Type in a few artists and build a streaming playlist made up of user-uploaded songs. The library is deep with plenty of remixes and full albums.
4. 14tracks.com – If underground movements and cutting-edge genres are your bag, 14tracks is perfect for you. Handpicked compilations based on themes like Scandanavian disco, cosmic soul, junglist hardcore, UK funky and loads more for about €7.50 each.
5. The Hype Machine – The daddy of the MP3 blogs. Put simply: “Every day, thousands of people around the world write about music they love, and it all ends up here.”
6. WeAreHunted.com – We Are Hunted claims to chart the most popular songs from all parts of the internet world. It’s heavily skewed towards what’s popular on the music blogs.
7. Breakingtunes.com – An Irish initiative to pitch the country’s bands at industry globally but it also functions as a great resource for new Irish music with streaming songs, profiles and bio info.
8. Elbo.ws – A lesser known but equally great music blog aggregator. Less reliant on remixes than The Hype Machine, it features top artists, tracks and videos in the sidebar to give you an instant pulse of what people are writing about.
9. TVAdmusic – Ads can make or break a song these days (see Florence’s Cosmic Love), so if you ever find yourself wondering who that song in the advert is by, this site will probably tell you.
10. Mixcloud – Pitching themselves as the “Youtube of radio”, Mixcloud offers on-demand DJ sets, radio shows and podcasts. It’s been adopted in dance music first but has a larger potential beyond those confines.
