Digital Home Thoughts: Fine-Tune Your Music Discoveries

"It starts when you're young -- a friend's older brother hands you a Fugazi tape and all of a sudden, you're hearing a sound that's totally new. Your friend's older brother has since been replaced by the web. There's more great music that you've never heard out there than ever before, but the veritable flood of material from artists of all stripes has made finding those choice nuggets of bliss that much harder. Several websites offer a reprieve from this overabundance of noise with a collaborative filtering process best described as "taste matching." Sites such as Pandora, iLike, Last.fm and Qloud recommend artists you might enjoy by comparing your favorite bands with those of other users."

This is actually a really good idea if you ask me - at least to those people that use the mentioned services or have a hard time coming up with new music to spend their money on. So far, my method has worked just fine for me: Amazon recommendations and user reviews. For example, Amazon will often have that section that says "Other people who bought this album also bought these...". And at the bottom in the user reviews, someone will often post something like "I love these guys, but they're not as good as such-and-such." I've found many a golden album that way. How about you? What method do you use to find new music? Browse the New Releases rack at your local B&M? How 20th Century... :wink: