By KCRW Social Media Manager, Betsy Moyer
As a mass consumer of music, I’m constantly perusing the internet for new tunes. Its no joke. I came to the station well aware of KCRW’s unique taste-maker status online. I constantly stumble upon bloggers mentioning our radio station as their route to discovery – from our
24 hour streaming music channel to our extensive online
archive. There is a vast well of new music to be explored online. The world at large loves music and wants to share it, and the internet is changing the way we consume that music more and more with each new discovery site. Aside from KCRW.com, here are 5 of my favorite places to discover new music online.
1. Music Blogs via The Hype Machine: http://hypem.com
There are way too many incredible music blogs to list. Thankfully there is HypeM.com. The “Hype Machine” website aggregates all of the mp3s and Soundcloud files that music bloggers across the globe are writing about, and makes them readily available in list format. Lists are created via crowd-sourced voting and often times bands are broken on the popular charts of this website. (e.g.
Jai Paul,
Darwin Deez, &
Chiddy Bang) The best part about this site is its immediate gratification – its all about the play button. Other features that I particularly enjoy, I can stream my list of songs that I’ve favorite-d or the songs that come in from my friends or the specific blogs that I follow. When I want a good passive listening experience – I never mind streaming HypeM.
While we accustom ourselves to twitter becoming a top resource for breaking news in journalism, its also revealing itself to me as an incredible resource for discovering new music and actually chatting with the artists and the bloggers that love them. I’ve sectioned off many streams of particular conversations on twitter to get the content that I need, but my favorite stream next to the
KCRW Staff stream comes from the list of over 70 music bloggers that I’ve lumped together. Check out the list, I recommend all of these folks to guide you to great new music and music news!
http://twitter.com/#!/BetsyKCRW/music-bloggers
Each day the KCRW Music Publicity Director gathers content from the many DJs and other trusted music bloggers to present “
Artists You Should Know.” It’s all about the streaming mp3′s, but there is nothing better than the personal discovery stories that often accompany each post author’s suggestion. It helps me to get a sense of each KCRW DJ’s tastes, and always turns me on to new genres that I might otherwise not have sought out.
This is the latest craze and all the cool kids are into it. Talk about a time-suck-vortex. Its currently in flux between BETA and its upcoming first release. Already over 100 thousand users are queuing up their songs and bobbing their heads along w/ other DJs in the many rooms that have been created. Essentially – YOU get to share the music that you love with 4 other friends in the DJ booth at the front of the room. Chat along about the tracks with the other users that enter the room, and encourage or discourage the other DJs by selecting “Awesome” or “Lame” when their song comes on. Choose songs from the impressive library that Turntable makes available, or upload your own mP3s. (I’m holding my breath to see how this pans out legally.) But, its a great site, combining all of the best that Social Strategies have to offer, from the gaming aspect to the personal touch. Imagine sharing your musical tastes with musicians, djs, record labels, and other major industry players – as many are already jumping on board. Join us when we have our room going
http://turntable.fm/kcrw
Think of We Are Hunted like the charts of yore – back when people used to buy actual physical albums. Charts were created based on the number of albums shipped. Nowadays we have to reassess the way we measure the popularity of music. We Are Hunted charts songs based on what people are saying online about music on sites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other forums. I think this is a GREAT new way to measure popularity! The music is presented so beautifully and really, that’s why I love to explore songs on it. I just flip through the one hundred most talked about songs of the day. Again, instant gratification, every artist image plays the song, and if you’d like to explore the artist further, you can do just that by clicking on the dropdown and exploring the artist bio complete w/ more tunes, buy links, their twitter streams and links to tons of blogs talking about them.
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