How Do you find you Bands?

Pandora.com is a wonderful tool for finding bands similar to ones you like. The main downfall is a lot of the bands are generally well known and it focuses more on musical styling and overlooks important aspects (to me, and I'd imagine a lot of us) such as political standpoint and lyrical focus.
I do attend a lot of shows and swap music collections with friends.
Anytime I see anyone with a tee shirt of a band I like, I engage them in conversation and try to get some band names from them, and give them a looking into.
Websites like this and rockbox are good for finding more obscure stuff, but sometimes you will have to randomly try stuff out to see if you like it.
Zines are a wonderful tool, there are a lot available in print for a small fee (normally shipping), and a very large collection are now available for completely free via the Internet.

I feel that Internet research is the number one best way with probing like-minded people being the next.

I am very interested in hearing some other ways as well, though.

 

last.fm works pretty well too imo
Also wikipedia has band-lists for most musical styles

 

I hate to say it but myspace. I look at bands I already listen to and look at their favs and go from there. I also use last fm. Great way of finding bands with similar styles.

 

yeah me too , myspace is good for one thing :/

 

i only look up myspaz when i've found them in zines, radio shows, you don't go to shows, that is the scene, shakes head, yes i'm judging you

 

Yeah, why don't you go to shows? Everything else is just a copy, it can't compare, at all.

 

Check the thank you lists on records you have bought in the past. There are usually many bands listed in there that either sound like the band you are into, or share the same mindset etc..

And yes, Myspace. Thats a good way to discover many bands in a short time, and preview songs/pics etc.

 

myspace and word of mouth
GO TO SHOWS

 

I got alot of music off some Livejournal communities. Just search for a particular genre of music, and theres generally a quite a few groups dedicated too it which means there will probably be groups for music swapping. People just post links to downloads on rapidshare or mediafire and if yr after something in particular you just put a post up and someone will generally link you to what you want.
I got majority of my Riot Grrrl collection from a group called twee-grrrl-share and found so many new amazing bands that I wouldn't have found any other way. Theres a lot of crap stuff too, but its worth sifting through it all.

 

do share

 

Going to shows, from friends, internet, magazines, sometimes even stores.

 

Going to shows, from friends, internet, magazines, sometimes even stores.

 

since I grew up in a small town in Iowa, and the internet only existed for those rich enough to afford a computer at the time, and no one around me even knew what a zine was. Well it was word of mouth really, or I would hear a band I liked find their album somehow, and then read the "thank you's" on the albums and find out what bands those bands were into, and it just grew from there. And later it was going to shows, and meeting new friends, and then computers got cheaper and myspace came about and things got much easier..... my main method thought was seeing what bands inspired bands that I liked, and what bands inspired those bands and so on so forth.

 

from people.Good news travel fast!!

 

Most often, I find new bands or old bands, through myspase, zines and on punk-blogs in blogspot.com.

 

Going to shows, talking with my friends, surfing the net and taking chances at distros or reasonly priced shops.

 

Shows and word of mouth account for some of it, but the vast majority of the 1100+ artists in my library were discovered through LastFM and blogs. .-.

Heads Up: BandCamp.com is already like the best online distributer I know of, and they just made it easier to discover new bands. Check 'em out. WAY better than MySpace and not associated with Rupert Murdoch.