Once again the USA give us a hint of how we’re gonna discover new music in the future. Browsing Myspace for hours and hours, skipping from a band’s friends, to their friend’s bands friends and so on is one option but in most cases there’s no real “discovery” in that.
In the US there’s quite a lot small music portals/communities which have specialized on the promotion of young, yet unknown bands. ‘Bottom up”, so to say… Since the idea is as genius as it is simple there’s no further explaination needed, so I am just gonna introduce you to the most important platforms:
1.) Pandora
Most of you might have heard of this website already. That’s the scary tool that analyses your taste of music and introduces you to bands that you ought to like. Big fun, loads of band information and soon available on your car stereo!
2.) iLike
A very flexible music discovery tool that can easily be connected with facebook (most facebook-band-pages use the iLike-plugin as an audioplayer), myspace, twitter, etc. 30 second clips of all tracks are available along with shitloads of free mp3 downloads. Can also be added as a widget to your iTunes installation.
3.) TheSixtyOne
“democratizes music culture”… Right, this means the FANS are able to rate and comment on all tracks bands make available on TheSixtyone and not a paid or corrupted editorial staff. The website hast just recently been redesigned and fueled with a long list of great features that makes it almost irresistable. Great concept, great realization, great music!
4.) Last.fm
This is the only music discovery website which is already established in Europe, too. In difference to Pandora it suggests artists that you might like but not because of musical attributes but based on other fans’ listening preferences. Also for show-announcements last.fm becomes more and more essential.
5.) Midomi
Midomi works similar to Shazaam that everyone should know by now from embarrassing tv-spots. The only difference is that Midomi also recognizes whistling and singing instead of only a song playing on the radio. Crazy, huh? iPhone app, android, nokia and windows apps available, too.
6. Hypemachine
Hypemachine understands itself as “blog aggregator”. The intro of the well structured website says: “every day, thousands of people around the world write about music they love — and it all ends up here.” . There’s LOADS of free music and an iPhone app is in the works.
7.) JamLegend
The last one for today is the most fun one. Jam Legend basically is the “everybody’s version” of Guitar Hero and Rockband. You can play songs by more than 350 artists (a lot of heavy music by the way) using the website’s interface our your own controller. Its a constantly growing community with great competitions and rankings while the best part is: It’s all for free.
As I mentioned above most of these services are only available/big in the US at the moment but I am sure you are geek enough to find a way to log in anyway. If not you might have to wait for another couple of months / years but at least you’re “prepared” now. 
