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?

Last.fm, Pandora, imeem and all the others are great for discovering and listening to music but I need the files too. The simple reason is that I want to play the tracks on my radio show and I need the sound file in a decent quality for that (192kbps mp3 at least).

Getting the tracks from the labels, iTunes or even from peer-to-peer networks has always been a good solution for me but for a few months I’ve been using Peel, a great mp3 blog reader, player and download tool. All you need to do is give Peel the mp3 blog URL and it will check automaticall which tracks are available on there, lets you listen to them and adds them to your iTunes library if needed.

For my purposes this is perfect:

• I don’t need to go to various mp3 blogs every week to see what’s new on there
• No more right-click and ‘save as’
• Since many of those blogs would write about new tracks/artist I always find music that is relevant for my show (I prefer to play new music but don’t do that exclusively)