Best places to go to hear new music

Hi,
My name is Matt, I am new to dj'ing and also to electronica (house, trance, etc.) where is the best place to find/hear new music or good songs to play, do you know of any websites geared to that? I have tried listening to Armin Van Buuren's weekly radio show to hear songs from there, and have had some success, but I am still new to the music and want to expand my horizons, can anyone recommend a website suitable for this or maybe one that has a good list that I can learn from. It is difficult for me to distinguish the different sub-genres within electronica, and I want to have a better understanding of what each one is, so I can find out what I like.

-Matt

Hi Matt,

A fairly easy way to find out what styles you may like and to be able to put a name with those styles as well as with some artists is to first get a pen and paper. Its always good to have one nearby when your surfing around for music/inspiration just so you can jot notes for reference.

I recommend starting out at beatport.com

Start by clicking on genres located in the top left corner of beatports homepage. That will open up a template in the center with all the genres that the company breaks their music catalog into. Breaks, electro house, minimal and so on.

Click on the actual name of the genre that you want to start with. Now the center screen will change again. In the top left corner of the center image youll see however many number of releases there are in that genre.

Click on that number. Now you will see images in the center and page numbers along the top of the center image.

Click an image. This loads a page in the center with all the tracks and track info into the center.

Click the little speaker icon next to a track that seems good to you.

There you go the song should be playing. The controls for the song are located in the center at the very top of the entire page. Click away to your hearts delight. Have fun! And good luck discovering what suits you best. Also a helputl tip. To navigate forward and back through pages use the two little arrows to the right of the search/go button.

Hope that helps a bit!

Shane

I'd start out at pandora radio (pandora.com). It's a neat free radio station that plays music similar to any artists you specify. You can even "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" songs and the station reacts accordingly. I always write down artists that sound good, and then check them out later at beatport (see Yeti's post above), or last.fm, or even youtube.com if it comes down to it.

As far as getting to know the vast genres of electronic music, the place to go is Ishkur's Guide (http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/).

Happy hunting!

Ishkur's Guide is getting long in the tooth. It hasn't been relevant since about 2004, and at the pace that electronic music changes, it's gotten very dated. For one, it makes no mention of major genres that have emerged such as electro house and dubstep.

I used to find alot of new music from this site its in spanish/english with alot of song xfer to youtube with High Quality audio

www.potenciadance.com/

Best way i find new music is to talk to other people who like the same sort of msuic, tell them what kind of music you like then ask for recommendations.

Pandora radio used to be great, but now every time i want to connect to it i have to go though all this crap to make it look like i am connecting from the US - because of that i dont listen to it very often at all anymore. But if you have access to it id recommend that, Pandora has introduced me to heaps of really good artists.

Youtube is great...especially with the recommendations window...so one thing always leads to another....And if you like trance then i can recommend you www.di.fm which is a free internet radio station...Just go check out www.shoutcast.com you can find alot of stuff on there =)

samurai fm is a good site some good mixes on there.also a lot of good podcasts on i-tunes,such as FWD,Ibiza Voice,Resident Advisor to name a few and if you check out the sites you may even get the tracklistings to help you pick out the ones you like.And then spend all your hard earned on Beatport!

a great way of finding out new music is to check out http://www.Last.Fm

find an artist, where you really enjoy their music, and type that artists name in the search field.

from there it will give you their bio and an option to listen to 'their' radio/playlist as well as their music. Other artists that are in the same genre of music or on the same record label would/should be on the playlist.

There is the, always essential, essential mix @ http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/essentialmix/

Blogs are probably the newest, biggest thing for finding music - the most comprehensive of which (because they basically troll other blog sites and post their tunes) being the hype machine @ http://hypem.com/

and, becuz everyone posts their tracklists here, the mixes section on this forum is also a great resource