heute:pop:blog.  

I talked about this on my radio show this morning and I wanted to publish this on here as well in case people couldn’t write down the links: these are some very easy ways of finding new music using on the internet. Those are not the only ways for me to find music but I use these tools every day discover songs that I want to play on my show.

Many readers of my blog will be aware of all the sites below so this might be more relevant listeners of my show on Tide 96.0 in Hamburg.

First of all, if you want to discover music easily on the internet you of course need a Last.fm account. I’m scrobbling everything I listen to to my Last.fm account in order to get events and new music recommended to me automatically by the system. This is a must have.

Over the last few months Spotify has become an essential tool for many people to listen and discover music. I used to use it only to listen to tracks that I knew already but more recently I started using the the shared playlists to find new tracks – I’ve started a heute:pop:morgen collaboratice playlist, feel free to add tracks.

I’ve been talking about Peel before on here. It is basically a software that automatically goes through a bunch of mp3 blogs and finds all the mp3s for you so you can easily download and listen to them. It safes me a lot of time every week when I want to find new songs to play on my show although I still have to go through a lot of tracks that might not be suitable for heute:pop:morgen. Mp3 blogs that I check out regularly include  Captain Obvious, Music Is Art and Song By Toad.

I actually still like reading print magazines but after my subscriptions ran out (I must have had at least 10 at some point) I never renewed them. I don’t mind paying for them but having all that paper around is a bit of a inconvenience sometimes. I pick up (print) magazines when I travel but don’t read any on a regular basis any more.

As you can see, what I produce every week is a very ‘traditional’ way of recommending music: putting together 13(ish) tracks, talking about those (amonst other topics) and playing them on the radio. But as much as I enjoy creating this I also still appreciate this as a way of finding new music: the BBC shows are something I listen to on a regular basis but only after they went on air in the iPlayer or (where available) as a podcast.

What am I missing?

I went to the BBC the other day for a quick radio interview: Rory Cellan-Jones asked Matt Mason and myself a few very broad questions about digital music and it’s effect on music owners. The odd thing was that I didn’t actually meet the two in person but we were all in three different studios (Matt was even in New York). Nevertheless I enjoyed it, you can listen to it here:

This actually a really cool thing from the Beebs: They have developed a widget (for Mac OSX and Yahoo! Widgets) which allows you to listen to BBC Radio 1, Radio 2, 6 Music or 1Xtra which then also ads the tracks that are played into your Last.fm account. The scrobbling probably only works for their non-specialist show, ie only when they are using their special playout software and not CDs or vinyl.

The probably best option is that I have the option of NOT having it scrobble everything automatically – surly I don’t want every track that I hear on one of the BBC station to show up in my profile. Just listening to BBC Radio 1 now (first time for quite a while) and it’s not easy to get used to all the talking when you’re normally only listen to Last.fm or your own mp3s.

I said on here before that I’m still a believer in ‘traditional’ radio where other people (who I don’t even know) decide what I should be listening to; if it’s someone I trust I’m happy to listen to his/her music selection. If I can scrobble that even better: I can then keep track on what was played and it’s easier for me to find the tunes later on and buy them.

Now I just want to be able to skip the tracks on the radio…