We posed the question, “How do you discover music?” to see the various and popular ways you discover new music besides just on The Hype Machine. You were allowed to check as many ways as you used.
Total Responses: 1430
Friends: The grandaddy of music discovery, friends will always be an influential source of your musical tastes. Last.FM takes this to the next level by letting you snoop on what your friends are listening to right now without them even saying anything. While I personally find this really fun, the best signal-to-noise ratio will usually be when your friends play an album so much that they make a verbal recommendation to you.
Print: Over half of you still look to print for music recommendations. Things like the NY Times Music Section, Spin, and Paste Magazine still have the worthwhile writing and critics to pick some winners. Or maybe you need something to read on the plane.
Online Editorial: Unsurprisingly, the most popular way for our visitors to discover new music is via website reviews and blogs. And really, what can compete? With the possibility to find new sources of music your friends (or entire town) hasn’t heard of and simply explore more music than could ever fit in a magazine or between your friends ears, blogs are the most comprehensive.
Online Mechanical: This included things like Pandora, Last.FM’s automatic recommendations, MyStrands and other automatic and personalized recommendations scored the lowest. My theory is because this is the newest way of music discovery only really coming to fruition in the last 5 years:
A) people are still getting used to trusting computer algorithms for recommendations on something so emotional/personal (something that blogs/friends obviously have)
B) algorithms for recommendations haven’t hit the tipping point of getting more rights than wrongs.
Other ways people mentioned they discover new music: (write-ins)
* Television show soundtracks (see TuneFind and rejoice)
* Looking at the Top 8 friends on myspace pages of bands I love (usually will be bands they love)
* Terrestrial Radio (in pure oversight, we forgot to even include Radio in this question. people still listen to radio?)
* Music Comes To Me Group: It was really interesting to read the write-in responses of music bloggers and people in the music biz (dj,s booking agents etc) who have new music hunt them down in the form of cds/mp3s/email promos. Speaking from experience, the signal-to-noise ratio here is abnormally high as you can guess.
More to come!
Most of the time, aside from my friends and online radio, I discovered music through watching TV. I don’t actually go for just new music, I want music that can magnetize my attention. It doesn’t matter if it’s just a new released or an old one. I’d always end up surfing the net to find those songs.
July 31, 2007 4:59 am
Promiscuous discovery: another digital music survey…
Entertainment Media Research weren’t the only people publishing results of a survey of digital music listeners yesterday (see yesterday’s post). On a slightly smaller scale, The Hype Machine an aggregator of music blogs that many consider a prime ind…
July 31, 2007 11:25 am
Not including terrestrial radio in this question was much more than an oversight. I am afraid it is a serious case of investigator bias. Yes, people – even young people – still listen to radio and even thought they are listening less and less, radio remains a major source of new music discovery.
Check out the Ad-Supported Music Central blog:
http://ad-supported-music.blogspot.com/
August 1, 2007 6:59 pm
I only listen to radio for sports talk. I know what style of music I like, so it makes sense that I follow my favorite bands through searches on music blogs, music video sites, music forums, etc. The odds of me finding anything in a music magazine like Blender or Rolling Stone are nil. For God’s sake, Paris Hilton is mentioned in them! They push what their advertisers tell them to push.
August 2, 2007 12:05 am
Marc: You raise a good point. I went back and filtered responses that checked the “other” box and mentioned radio. Here’s what I found:
7.6% of all respondents (not just ones who checked ‘other’) mentioned radio as a source of music discovery.
7.6% percent is pretty significant, but I would argue not a “major source of new music discovery” compared to even our lowest ranking source “online mechanical” (with 22%).
August 2, 2007 12:00 pm
[…] recent non-scientific survey of users of the blog aggregator Hype Machine found that, like the first report, friends still […]
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