Artistcloud is an experimental web 2.0 site that gives you a ‘tag cloud’ of related artists or bands. Clicking a related artist get’s his related artists etc. Ideal to find similar artists or bands. You also get YouTube video’s.

Second best seems to be assorted on-line offerings (Pandora works well), but they often lack sufficient, well-positioned randomness. So you tend to hear things similar to what you already know you like, but are less likely to discover new *types* of music.

For a good range of new sounds, wnyc has a show called, oddly enough, New Sounds. You can listen to past shows from the wnyc.org site. Mostly they offer mp3; sometimes (for reasons I can’t find) it’s RealAudio.

1) Listen to NPR.org for news. Not only do you get a nice dose of news, but they usually have snippets between breaks that feature some of the widest variety of music. If you like something, you can visit the website and see the tracks.

2) If you have a ton of CD’s and want to trade for others, you can check out LaLa.com.

3) Try Musicovery.com. It’s similar to the visual based discovery services you pointed out in your article and even allows you to listen to songs not found on the Billboard charts.

I’ve never looked at The Filter before but it does look quite handy. At the moment I just use a smart playlist in iTunes to show me all the tracks with a playcount of zero, and let it pick random tracks from that playlist for me. Thanks for the tip, Sarah :o)

For me, discovery is becoming a lot easier nowadays. What’s working for me though, is magazines. Primarily NME, Q and occasionally Kerrang, since that’s the sort of stuff I dig. Facebook can also be quite handy; click a bands name that you’ve put in your interests and it’ll give you a list of people who also have that band in their music list. Look at other bands on their page and check them out. Also don’t forget live gigs! Go see a band you like with a few friends, talk to other people there and you’ll come home with a huge list of other bands to check out.

As for vetting, I have to admit to using BitTorrent I’m afraid. As far as I’m aware, subscription services won’t work for me as the vast majority of music I listen to is either on my iPod or on CD in my car. Listening to a 30 second clip on Amazon isn’t good enough for me, and I don’t always have the time to go to a store to listen to it there. If I dig the album and find myself listening to it frequently enough, I buy it from Play or Amazon since the iTMS is mostly only 128kbps which is pretty shoddy, and I like to have the physical CD in my collection :o)

Discovering new music is only the half of it, a major problem is once you have all of this great new music in your iTunes library you only get round to listening to a small percentage of it (I have 20 gigs of music I have not listened to in my 60GB library!)

This is where software like The Filter comes into play. It can help you rediscover your music library by building playlists from all your new music and putting it in context with your old stuff – really comes in handy.

By the way, this software can also recommend new music for you to buy but I don’t use this element much.