Look for places where the music is curated for you... this can help lead to some unexpected finds that are outside your sphere of musical knowledge but are related to your taste.
Online radio: My favorite station is KCRW, a public radio station in Los Angeles. You can listen to all of their shows online or via their iPhone app. DJ's Garth Trinidad & Jeremy Sole have fairly consistently good shows. There are plenty of others you might like. Check out the "Guest DJ Project" as well: it features quick samples of playlists curated by interesting folks like Tim Robbins & Jad Abumrad. Friends recommend KEXP in Seattle for music as well. NPR's Music Page can also be a good resource.
Websites & blogs abound that feature tracks & mixes worth checking out. Check out Flavor Pill / Flavor Wire for a variety of styles, iso50 for some clever remix collections & if you appreciate the esoteric, visit dublab & aquarium drunkard as well. Just off mainstream is boomrad. Despite the drop in user-ship and a rough interface, MySpace is still choc-a-bloc with independent music. MySpace playlists seem to bias toward pop but might be worth a look. For independent music you likely haven't heard yet + the closest listening experience to an LP, check out the sixty-one. There are plenty more sites and always more on the way, for now try: the venerable pitchfork, & the hype machine,plus epitonic, the international mixtape project, fluxblog, stereogum, & music for robots). This Mashable article lists 18 blogs on Tumblr that relate to music. The illuminated mixtapes also comes recommended. Back to Mine is a series of mixtapes from cool artists based on the premise that they each create a playlist that reflects music they would play at an after party. Nice stuff.
Movie soundtracks are a good place to look as they provide context for the how the music is used as are TV shows (end credits are particularly good). You can of ten find lists of music used in TV & Radio shows online (If you browse episodes of HBO shows, for example, they list out all the music on the show on their website: here's an example, NPR sometimes gives a rundown of the music on their shows as well: example.
Restaurants work as well... If you have a smart phone, Shazam is an invaluable app that allows you to take a quick sample of a song by pointing your phone's microphone at a speaker, then it sends the sample to be analyzed and compared against a database of sounds, returning a song title, album name, & link to purchase. I've found it to be at least 80% accurate with some pretty esoteric song titles in some pretty noisy environments. It's magical.
Restaurants work as well... If you have a smart phone, Shazam is an invaluable app that allows you to take a quick sample of a song by pointing your phone's microphone at a speaker, then it sends the sample to be analyzed and compared against a database of sounds, returning a song title, album name, & link to purchase. I've found it to be at least 80% accurate with some pretty esoteric song titles in some pretty noisy environments. It's magical.
Decidedly more mainstream, iTunes also features some online mixes worth checking out. For instance, try searching the music store for iTunes Essentials, Celebrity Playlists, or iMIxes. Also mainstream but interesting is Your Music Today. Spotify is now in the US. Enough said. rdio is a Spotify alternative. Songza also has sets of playlists that you can browse. In addition to allowing you to create your own playlists (& the widgets used on this site) Grooveshark allows you to browse popular & recent playlists from other users. You can create your own playlists as well -- for free. As of Sept 2010, iTunes Ping has just launched allowing you to follow the purchases & comments of other iTunes listeners -- yet to be proven, but has potential. 8tracks allows users to create their own mixtapes -- worth a gander. Soundcloud is well, sound stored in the cloud––lot's of it & more everyday. Tons of independent music up there -- a bit hard to find the goods, though. Turntable.fm is a clever little app / site where you can enter musically themed "rooms" and listen to other users as they DJ's.
Pandora's automatic music aggregation is a wonderful thing, but it is not quite good enough to drive an experience. It is, however great for mining for songs. Just create a station around a song you like and create a log of the songs it pulls up so you can deploy them with intention when the time is right. Last.fm & Slacker Radio serve similar purposes.
Sites like LivePlasma (also Misucovery, & TuneGlue Music Map) serve up visualizations of relationships between musical acts / artist. Type in your favorite artist & they will visualize connections to other artists (based on data from sites like amazon & last.fm). More for fun than practical purposes, they sometimes serve up some new material if you take the time to explore intentionally.
Sites like LivePlasma (also Misucovery, & TuneGlue Music Map) serve up visualizations of relationships between musical acts / artist. Type in your favorite artist & they will visualize connections to other artists (based on data from sites like amazon & last.fm). More for fun than practical purposes, they sometimes serve up some new material if you take the time to explore intentionally.
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