Tuesday, August 23, 2011

How to Discover New Music in the Post-MP3 Age

By Whitson Gordon

How to Discover New Music in the Post-MP3 Age

You may have listened to a lot of music when you were younger, but between work, social requirements, and paying the bills, the joy of discovering new music is one of those things that's often pushed to the back burner. Luckily internet services abound for discovering, trying, and buying new music. Unfortunately, your choices can be a little overwhelming, not all tools fit your needs, and few of them actually integrate with one another. Here's how to work new music into your life in a post-MP3 age, from discovering it to integrating it into your library.

Until relatively recently, listening to new music meant hearing a song on the radio or hunting down new albums or MP3s. Now services like Spotify, Rdio, and Grooveshark allow you to listen to virtually any song on demand whether you've bought an MP3 or not. For most purposes, the MP3 is irrelevant—you can enjoy new music straight from the cloud. So now that you're options are so open, how do you use these excellent music services to streamline your music discovery workflow?

First, for example, you hear a few songs on Pandora or Last.fm, then you search out those songs on Spotify to put them in your own playlists, then you have to search for them again on Amazon MP3 or iTunes (or less reputable file-sharing services) if you want to download them for permanent storage—and that's using only three of the many online streaming services we have today. If you use more, the amount of typing you have to do can get really, really, tedious.

For me, discovering music is a three step process:

To start, I hear something for the first time. Usually this is through an online recommendation engine, radio station, or when I'm out and about in the world. Usually it's a situation where I can't listen to the song again on demand, and sometimes I don't even know what it is—I just know it sounds cool.
Once I find out what the song is, I'll add that tracks or artist I'm curious about to a playlist in Grooveshark or Spotify. There, I can listen to those songs a few times to decide if I really like them or if they just sounded good in the moment.
Lastly, if I do really like that artist, album, or track, I'll buy it and give it a permanent spot in my collection. From here, I can sync that music down to my iPods, play it on my computer, or burn it on a CD for my car. The music has completed its journey from discovery to installment in my local library.

Before, I used to just write down the names of songs and artists as I heard them, but that method was long and tedious painful. I've lately taken a different approach to discovering music: with a few external services, I can send tracks from one step in the process to the next just by clicking a button. Here's how to set it up.

Step One: Discovering New Music You Like

Unless you have friends that listen to the exact same music (and actively share it with you), you probably discover most of your music through some sort of radio. Everyone has their favorite music discovery service, but chances are you actually have a few services you like, After all, they all give out slightly different suggestions, so why limit yourself to just one? Here are some of the different services we recommend, and how you should use them.

Radio Stations: Pandora, Last.fm

Online radio stations like Pandora and Last.fm start with an artist or track and then spit out a radio station that plays similar music. If you've ever used online radio before, you know how it works: you can mark songs you like with a "thumbs up", "heart" or other "like" button and dislike songs with a "thumbs down" or "ban" button. This feature is what we'll be using later on in this process, so as you listen, make sure you actively "thumbs up", "love", or otherwise mark songs you like.

Services like Spotify and Grooveshark, which are the crux of step two (that is, streaming your newfound music on demand), often have their own "radio" features built-in. These radio features aren't always as good as other external services like Pandora, but if you use them, you can still integrate them with our three-step process. In Spotify, just click on the song's album art in the radio bar and drag it into a new playlist. In Grooveshark, just hit the plus sign to add it to the playlist of your choice.

Live Playlists like Turntable.fm

Turntable.fm is an awesome new service that, unlike Pandora and Last.fm, uses real live people to create radio stations instead of some formula. In Turntable, you enter a "room" with up to five DJs, playing different songs in real time, usually with an overarching genre or theme. Turntable also has nice integration with other music services like Spotify, letting you send a track to your service of choice with the click of a button. Just hover over the DJ table to see the services it supports, and if you hear a song you like, click on that service's icon to send the song.

Music Identifiers like Shazam and Limili

Every once in a while you're bound to discover new music when you least expect it, whether you're in your friend's car or you just hear something a in store at the mall. Apps like Shazam are perfect for this situation. It uses your phone's microphone to identify the song's artist and title after 30 seconds or so of listening. It'll then give you links to buy the song at places like iTunes or Amazon MP3, and if you have the Spotify app on your device, you can link directly to that song in Spotify.

If you have an iOS device, I recommend a similar app called Limili, that can not only ID songs, but send them to tons of different services, like Grooveshark, Last.fm, Spotify, and others. Just add your account credentials for the services you plan on using, and you can send tracks right from the song's page in Limili.

Read Reviews from a Trusted Source

Lastly, there's still something to be said for old school music magazines, blogs, and other sources. It requires a bit more work on your part (since you have to actively read and can't multitask while doing so), but it is still a tried and true method of discovering bands that you'll like.

Step Two: On Demand Streaming

Rarely do you hear a song and think, "this song is epic, I'm going to buy the entire album right now!" Generally, when you discover a new track or artist, you want to hear it a few times before you go through the trouble of adding it to your collection. That's what step two is for. Grooveshark and Spotify are two of the best streaming services around, and they're perfect for this particular step, since they let you listen to music on demand and multiple times through.

The key to this step is getting all the songs you've liked from step one and migrating them over to Spotify and Grooveshark hassle-free. Here are some tricks to make it happen.

Spotify

Spotify has its own built-in Artist Radio feature, but if you use anything else, you'll need to import your liked tracks. Spotibot, apart from being a very cool Spotify-based recommendation engine, has a really neat feature that turns your "loved" Last.fm tracks into a Spotify playlist. Just link Spotibot your Spotify account, give Spotibot your Last.fm username, and it will give you a link that adds all those tracks to a playlist on Spotify.

Similarly, if you use Pandora, the Pandora-to-Spotify Chrome Extension can add your thumbs upped tracks to Spotify. When listening to a station on Pandora, hit the station's Options button and go to Edit Station Details. Then, from the new page that pops up, click on the Pandora-to-Spotify extension button. It'll list Spotify URLs for each of your thumbs upped tracks on that station. Copy those links, head to a playlist on Spotify, and hit Ctrl+V to add those tracks to the playlist.

As previously mentioned, Turntable.fm users can just click the Spotify icon in Turntable to add a song to your Spotify library. Similarly, Shazam and Limili both have "Send to Spotify" buttons that will add that track to one of your Spotify playlists. Once you've got a bunch of tracks gathered up from your discovery services, you can listen through them a few times and decide whether you actually like them well enough to buy.

Grooveshark

Grooveshark users can import tracks from other services just as easily. If you have a number of loved tracks on Last.fm, you can add them to Grooveshark with previously mentioned Groovylists. Just punch your Last.fm username into Groovylists, pick your Loved Tracks playlist when prompted, and you can then listen to those songs in Grooveshark as much as you want. There doesn't seem to be a similar service for thumbs upped tracks in Pandora, but if you use Spotify, you can always send thumbs upped tracks to Spotify though the above Chrome extension and then send that playlist to Grooveshark through Groovylists.

If you use Turntable.fm, you may notice that Grooveshark is missing from the list of services on the DJ table. Luckily, a simple Chrome extension solves this problem nicely. Just install the extension, and click on its toolbar button whenever you hear a song in Turntable that you like. It'll bring that song up in a Grooveshark search so you can quickly add it to a playlist for later listening.

If you're using Limli, Grooveshark support is built-in. Just identify a song, hit that Grooveshark button, and listen to it whenever you want, however many times you want before you buy.

Step Three: Buying (Optional)

For some of you, on demand streaming might be the last step in the process. If Spotify or Grooveshark is your main music player, you're done! However, if you like to have your own local collection, the next step is actually buying the album. Spotify doesn't have an easy way of linking you to online stores, but Grooveshark users can just click the plus sign next to a song, hit "Buy Song", and choose iTunes or the Amazon MP3 store. It should take you straight to the album, and you can buy the song there for permanent storage on your computer.

That should help get you started figuring out your ideal music discovery path. Obviously, there are a ton of other services out there, and some work better with this method than others (for example, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to import Pandora tracks into Grooveshark, and Spotify doesn't let you buy music with one click). However, it should make the journey from discovery to download a bit simpler and more streamlined. Got another service you love to use in one of these steps, or an easier way to import tracks between them? Let us know in the comments.

You can contact Whitson Gordon, the author of this post, at whitson@lifehacker.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and lurking around our #tips page.