A Match Made in Heaven

Today's feature...another entry about music - but this one's educational and you WILL find your next favorite band if you follow these simple steps (yes, I can make guarantees on here...just try and sue me- not really, but yeah, go ahead and try).

1. Set up an account with Pandora, a program created by the good folks at the Music Genome Project (MGP).

• Pandora is essentially a streaming radio, but you get to program the stations. Yes, I know other programs have this capability (Musicmatch Jukebox was one of the originals), but Pandora incorporates the immense database of the MGP. The MGP basically tags songs, just like you would tag photos, with phrases describing the quality of each song, ranging from the instrumentation, to the genre, to the lyrics, and even the timbre of the vocals.
• You create a radio station by starting with an artist/band or song that you like, and Pandora generates songs that are strikingly similar to the one used to create the station. You can then give a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down", look at why Pandora selected that song, and if you really like the song you can bookmark it where it is saved in your profile for future reference.

2. Look at the songs you bookmarked and check to see if that artist is on MySpace. Today alone I found 3 new artists that I particularly enjoy (Looper, What Made Milwaukee Famous, and Ms. John Soda).

• Not to preach to the choir or treat the few readers I have as idiots, but MySpace is the largest social networking site on the internet, and even has a search function dedicated to searching for artists.
• Typically, an artist's MySpace page will have 4 songs available for streaming, and some even have downloads available.

3. Check iTunes to see if the album or song is available for download. If not, call your local record store, visit the artist's website (which is sometimes their MySpace page- as is the case with a trio I really enjoy, One Block Radius).

• For God's sake (no, I'm not talking about a divine rice wine from Japan), do not illegally download the track. Pandora goes out of it's way to mix in lesser known groups with the more mainstream ones. Support these guys so they can become rich and then you can illegally download the track because they're millionaires anyway.

There you have it, Jake's 3 easy steps to finding your next favorite new band. Leave a comment about a band you want me to check out, or if you have another awesome suggestion as to how I should go about finding my next favorite band.