find new music
In the past, one had to go out and physically search for new music, whether it was in the store or at a live show. That method is deprecated. Today, you can find all kinds of new and unreleased music with the click of a mouse. The music store is out and online shopping is all the rage. There are many websites like Bandcamp and Beatport that offer downloadable content for the same price as an audio CD. The advantage here is that you don’t have to waste valuable time and money going to the store and you don’t have to worry about your purchase being damaged in any way. Each site has its own search engine if you’re looking for something in particular, and you can browse through a number of categories, such as release date, genre, etc.
Another advantage of downloading music from the Internet is that these websites will show you albums that are related to your search in one way or another. It could be from the same artist, or it could be from the same genre, or it could even be a completely different artist and genre that has the same name (This has happened to me by the way). In this spirit, you can sit in front of your computer all day, just browsing through all the related albums that the website has to offer. Most of the time, you may not find anything that interests you, but when you do, you’ll feel like all the wasted hours were worth it.
Popular social networking sites are also good sources for new underground music. Every major artist, and therefore every minor artist, has a Facebook page, a SoundCloud page, a YouTube page, a MySpace page, a ReverbNation page, and possibly more pages than I care to know about, although Facebook and MySpace should not be. taken too seriously; Facebook, because everyone is so lost in their own pseudo-personal virtual lives that any music on the site generally falls on deaf ears, and; MySpace, due to file size and format restrictions: Nobody wants to listen to low-quality MP3s when they get lossless audio on SoundCloud.
YouTube and SoundCloud are, IMHO, the most trusted sources of good, unique music simply because they were designed for that: sharing media content. When someone logs into one of these sites, you can be sure that their only goal is to search for music.
SoundCloud even gives you the option to download directly from the website. If the uploader has enabled downloads for your upload, that is. Many DJ’s are using this to their advantage by uploading their live sets for promotional purposes. Independent producers are also uploading their original music and allowing downloads, as a kind of gift to their listeners on SoundCloud for supporting them and spreading their music. You may also find ‘buy’ links to some tracks, depending on whether the uploader has inserted one or not. This will probably take you back to popular pay sites like Beatport or iTunes.