However, I’m finding that these days, I’m also getting to new and undiscovered older music without the help of traditional critical gatekeepers. I occasionally stop by music blog aggregator sites like elbo.ws that tend to be on the leading edge of what’s buzzy, and provide easy links to free (and increasingly legally released by the bands and labels) mp3s & videos. During the couple of months that I was enamored with Turntable.fm, fellow fans played me a bunch of great stuff I hadn’t heard.

But the source that has exposed me to the most and widest variety of music lately is the Related Artists linking function in Spotify. From any selected artist, you can almost instantly listen to what seems like an infinitely branching tree of connected musicians. It’s an incredible tool–I’ll expand on my thoughts about Spotify in a future post.