Finding new music
It is really hard to find new music these days.
When I was younger, there was something called a “record store” that you could go to to buy albums, 45’s, cassettes, and eventually CD’s. I’m not talking about anything like Best Buy, Walmart, etc. I’m talking about a little hole in the wall store where all they sold was music. You would walk in, there would be some strange music playing that you have never heard before, and there would be a strange odor in the air. You could tell if you were in the right kind of music store if they also sold “tobacco accessories”, lava lamps, incense, etc. If any one of these things were missing, you are not in a true music store.
There would be some unusual, eccentric person working there, that could recommend music for you based on the music you told them you liked. I found many new bands and musical genres that I enjoy this way. On occasion, they would actually have the band live in the store pitching their new album, especially if they were a new band. One band such as this was Metallica. I bought their first album because Cliff Burton handed me a copy and told me to buy it. If I only realized at the time who they were…
So, we go to today. There are no more music stores that only sell music, or at least there are none in my area, not like the ones there used to be. Kinda like there are no real hardware stores anymore, but that is a different post. Now you have Best Buy, Walmart, and a few other B&M’s, plus quite a few online stores. In these places you can at least shuffle around in the CD’s located with the other genres that you like, and take a chance that they might be ok, but there is a good chance they suck. You could buy a track from iTunes, and sample a portion of it before you buy it but it’s really hard to determine if a band is any good by listening to a 30 second sample of a track. You can’t really trust the guy at the big B&M store’s reccomendation that “dude, these guy’s are sick!”, because he has no idea what you like, and probably only listens to a few select bands that everyone else seems to already like. You can get those kind of albums from the bestseller list, no real help there.
But there is some help out there, you just have to find it. It’s still not as good as the old music store, but it’s new technology, and it will probably get better. It’s at a website called Pandora. There you can enter bands that you like, and based on an algorithm, they will try to play songs that you like. It works pretty well, try it out.
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