Green Tee Readings

Twice in the week surrounding Christmas I had people ask me, in slightly exasperated tones, where I find new music. To me, this is a very confusing question. Where could I go where I wouldn’t find new music? Favorite TV shows frequently feature good music, and movies always have soundtracks. Books reference music. There are weird little places called where anyone can go and purchase music. I think they’ve been called record stores. These stores even often showcase new, interesting music and the best ones have staff members who are willing to have a conversation with you, the potential customer and potential new fan, about bands.

Snark aside, I often forget that information (and avenues for getting information) I take for granted might not be disseminated, so both to get the information organized for myself and to further spread the information, an unordered list.

• allmusic - seemingly the go to site for basic music information and reviews. A fantastic starting point.

• 75orless - Reviews of indie music done in 75 words or less. Utility is reviewer specific and I’m normally looking for some keywords to see if more investigation is warranted.
• eMusic - the 90 song subscription I have means that I’ll always have new music around and their indie specialty means that a lot of it will be stuff that the world at large hasn’t heard yet.
• Pandora - really good Internet radio
• KEXP - a very good radio station out of Seattle that streams and has various podcasts. I don’t listen to them as much as I used to, but they’re a great resource for finding new stuff
• Last.fm - a good mashup of music and social networking. What artist pages on Myspace would look like if they were on Facebook
• Under The Radar - Their rating system is too vague, so like 75orless, I keyword search more than anything as I read through. I used to like picking up issues of Paste, but they diversified too much for me with their slim issue size.
• Friends. The best resource possible

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