Opening Pandora's online box
Music before you discover it is kind of like America before Christopher Columbus: sure, it existed, but it didn't really matter until white people found it. Or so my racist history textbooks tell me.
More music exists than a normal person who values their earbuds and time cares to listen to. So how is a music geek to find new music?
There's always the old-fashioned radio. But here in Columbia, your options for contemporary music are limited. You could check out Y107, a Top 40 station that acts like a crack whore addicted to the cocaine that is Miley Cyrus and Kanye West. Q106 is a bland copycat. With those two, it's like a "chicken and the egg" scenario, except even philosophy majors have better uses of their time.
AM radio is the last bastion of queer-hating Jesus freaks, not music hounds.
Music also comes in physical format in something called a CD, or so my father tells me. Those wacky old people, hung up on the tangible pleasure of goods that are already available online for free! Pure nonsense.
Your first choice should be listening to music online. But what to choose?
Playlist.com is meant for people to build their own playlists of music they already know.
Options abound for people who want to get a fresh sampling of music they are not familiar with.
If you're a college student, let's assume you've graduated to Facebook and left your MySpace unattended, your old MySpace spammed by all types of fetishists and porn stars. MySpace may be a pit of despair, but MySpace Music is still a repository of not terrible music!
Don't be rash and start up your MySpace again, but check out the top of the music charts for artists, both signed and unsigned, that are worth a listen
In my emo youth, I found online sanctum in PureVolume. The site is a hodge podge of mainstream signed artists and unsigned nobodies who will be lucky to make it to 100 plays. You can hop scotch down the top artists play lists from emo to electronica to every other genre of white people music.
But the creme de la creme of online music serendipity is no doubt Pandora.
For the uninitiated, Pandora is an online radio station that you customize. Say you want to listen to songs by Lada Gaga and other ones that sound like her (it?). You can set up a Lady Gaga playlist that will also play Timbaland and the Pussycat Dolls. And, of course, Gaga herself.
If you just wanted to listen to songs that are either by or sound exactly like Lady Gaga, you should just ignore my advice entirely and stick with Y107. However, for those who don't want to criminally damage their ears, and instead listen to some relatively unknown new music, Pandora's the way to go.