I listen to a lot of music on Rhapsody, which also has related artists
and artist radio stations.  My listening has been a bit everywhere
lately (my rhapsody playlist has Joan Baez, Penderecki, Stravinsky's
Greek Ballets, and the new Portishead album).  Some of that came from
existing curiosities, the Stravinsky came from a concert I attended
and wanting to know the piece better, and the Portishead came up as a
new album last week and I check the new albums that show up on
Rhapsody (and I like Portishead anyways :) ).

For new music to explore, I'm finding that mostly I hear word from
either blogs I subscribe to their RSS feeds or concerts I go to
(though haven't gone to too many recently).  I subscribe to a lot of
blog RSS feeds and usually scan the music feeds more carefully than
others, and when there are CD reviews I will usually take a deeper
look and if interested then check if it is on Rhapsody.

Probably the most exciting in terms of exposure to new music was going
to the Warsaw Autumn (http://www.warszawska-jesien.art.pl).  I still
think it's best music festival for contemporary music I know of, and
when I went two years ago it was incredible for discovering a lot of
music.  (Got to hear Sciarrino's "Quaderno di strada", Gorecki's
"Miserere", Murail's "Winter Fragments", Lachenmann's "TemA", and
plenty of other pieces performed live and performed extremely well.)
I ended up going to 16 concerts in 8 days, and that was without going
to all of them!  I missed last year's but my girlfriend went and said
it was fantastic.  Might be of interest to see the program from last
year which is on the site.  (If you want to see notes from the
concerts I went to a couple years ago, you can search "Warsaw Autumn"
on my site kunstmusik.com).

When I would go to brick and mortar stores (now very infrequently as
the only one I would go to regularly in SF(Tower) is closed, and the
other one I liked (Amoeba Music, in the Haight) is too far now that I
am in Berkeley), I often would look by CD Label (Mode, Kairos, Auvidis
Montaigne, ECM, etc.).  I guess music discovery is always a question
of trusted authorities, whether it be concert, book, blog, website, cd
label, friends, etc. and hopefully finding as many good authorities as
one can!

steven




On Fri, May 9, 2008 at 9:53 AM, Felipe Sateler <fsateler@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Friday 09 May 2008 11:37:24 Michael Gogins wrote:
>> Thanks for your response. I have never heard of last.fm, so I will now
>> google to find out what it is.
>
> Last.fm has the bonus that it tracks what you listen to, and compares that to
> other last.fm users. So you get recommendations based on that.
> Also, it creates "neighbours", people who have similar artists in their
> history. Then you can go to those peoples profiles and check what stuff they
> listen to that you don't know of.
> I've been using that lately.
>
> --
> Felipe Sateler
>