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Musical Discovery Methods
so I was reading this wired mag article (http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0...tw=wn_culture_5) which is a familair topic, the decline of music sales, except this one came with the results of a nation wide survey that said something interesting at the bottom:
| quote: | | FM radio is still the main way most fans find out about new music, according to the poll. Television shows are a distant second. |
which brings up the age old question, how do you find out about music, what do you do to explore?
The way I see it, there are several methods working for dance music:
-Radio whoring(listen to a radio, whether it be your local FM station or digitally imported, just waiting for good stuff to come on, then you ID it and buy it)
-Party Spotting(go out alot, listen to the tracks the DJ plays, ID the ones that interest you)
-DJ Stalking(you're a fan of a certain DJ, follow that person's sets, get stuff that person plays from their tracklists)
-Web Watching(go to sites that mention tunes, your EDM news sites, your web forums, the Radio1's dance section, whatever, and just listen to every track that you find mentioned on those sites until you find enjoyable music)
-Recomendation services(sites like last.fm, shops like amazon, various charts, all have little systems in place to pick music for you, find a source whose judgement you trust and buy their shit like you're in the Oprah book club)
-Magazines and gossip(keep up with the words people say, figure out what people think is the cool thing, let other people tell you what the flavor of the month is, get the stuff they suggest, listen to the cd's that come in the mag)
these few methods have the side effect that you are never going to be the early adopter if you do it this way, somebody has to play the tune for you, somebody else already whoring the thing before you can even figure out what it is called. You have other people acting as a filter so that everything you find has their approval first, some would call this a blessing because it provides a certain quality control, others would disagree.
Then there are other ways:
-Record Shop Hunting(go to the record store, spend six hours in there listening to tunes, buy the interesting ones)
-Random searching(get on google, or napster, or some sort of search engine that lets you search for music and enter in something like "trance 2006" or "phat dope shit" or whatever random phrase or description that you can think of, and listen to whatever happens to show up in the result)
-Promo filtering(you have to be in a position of privalege, people send you all sorts of music, you pick out the good stuff)
-Label whoring(find some artists, labels, record pools, some sort of collective that consistently puts out sounds you enjoy, and just follow them)
These take more work, record shop hunting is traditionally reserved for DJ's because you are usually going into a shore that has crates and crates of vinyl that you carry up to the store's tables and listen to one by one, hard to do when there are no good record stores within traveling distance, unless you have the patience to liten to crappy samples of every track on an internet shop. At least you get to choose for yourself though, these methods allow you to deviate and find possibly unique things, all except for label whoring which first requires finding a source that you like.
I tend to do alot of radio whoring, I listen to alot of different streams and pick out stuff that is good. I used to do alot more random searches and recomendation services but they haven't brought me much success lately.
What strategies do you all use for exploring music? What do you think works the best for finding quality trance? I just wonder how other people do it sometimes, where do they find the stuff, where does it come from?
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