How do you people find such great songs???

[Dar]

check out the band Thursday
hardly anyone has used em for amvs yet
(besides the thursday mep of course >_>)

[Dr. Derpface, J.D.]

Thursday

Stop contributing to the problem.

[ShatteredFlame]

Thursday

Stop contributing to the problem.

Lmao I hear nowadays The Dillinger Escape Plan is completely outstaging them on their own tour

Someone use TDEP, cause no one ever uses any extreme music

[kentoshogun]

I don't know if it's normal, but i normally don't look for a song to fit the source video, i look for a video to fit the song, what i mean is that i normally get inspired by the song instead of the anime, what it means that the thing you need is to open your mind to new music always, when you listen to something and you like it, it can happen that the idea for the amv comes in a second, there are sooooo many ways to find new music. As many of users told you, LastFM is one of the best ways.

Anyway, the first step is to ask yourself what kind of music or genre you most like.


In my blog http://lastfmusic.blogspot.com/ you can find a hell of a lot of genres to explore, (yes it's in spanish), anyway, i know lot of them have copyright, but since it's not the only blog of this kind in the internetz, doesn't matter. But i will say that if you really like some stuff, buy it, you'll feel well, like happen to me with Doves,Radiohead,etc.

GL.

[Kai Stromler]

Getting into new music is a process of a) getting outside of your current comfort zone, as Fire_Starter already noted, and b) having faith in exploration to get you there. Being kind of old-fashioned (and on a crap connection when not at work), I can't speak for lastfm's efficacy, but here are some other thing you might try while trawling said service.

- trawl through the What Are You Listening To Right Now thread and look up bands that the description sounds interesting from. Not just for their music; if you like the music, look them up on Wikipedia and see who the current members have played with in the past, what past members are doing right now, etc. If you Google them and find people on music forums slagging them as a lame ripoff of band Y, dig up band Y's stuff and listen to that and do the same process. If people are promoting band Z as "the new band X", go ahead and listen to them as well.

- this is much less useful than it used to be in the pre-digital age, but if you're noticing that a lot of the bands you like tend to be on the same couple indie labels, anything that you find recorded on that label is worthy of consideration. When I was in college, people used to buy anything recorded on Matador because the Frogs were on Matador and that gave it immediate credence; I have yet to find a bad record recorded on Deepsend (though they did refuse to sign Porphyria because they wore bandanas), even though the kind of death metal that they specialize in can turn pretty bad pretty easily. Majors, of course, are too big for this to be useful.

- deliberately listen to music you don't want to bother with. If you go to see a band you like live, go at doors and see the openers, then stick for the headliner if the band you like is opening. You'll never get into a new band if you decide they suck and don't go see them. If you're at a big show and someone hands you a flier for a DIY gig, don't just throw it away; look up the bands playing and go if you're interested and don't have any other commitments. If you're going to a festival anyway, go all the way through the fine print at the bottom of the bill and see all of the undercard bands that look interesting at all, or at least as many as you can.

- read through Last Plane To Jakarta, including and especially the archives. John Darnielle has interest in a ridiculously wide range of music and a penchant for digging out gems from the bottom of any pile he comes across, and the writing is pretty good as well.

hth,

--K

[Otohiko]

Well, I don't think I'm totally qualified to give advice here - I grew up in the family of a professional musician, which gave me an unfair advantage...

But aside from the excellent advice given so far here, I'd also simply suggest befriending people whose music taste seems interesting to you, and vice versa - get interested in the music tastes of friends you already have and who seem to be in a somewhat different 'music zone' than you are and than the mainstream is. But don't expect people to simply come and hand you good music - be willing to pester, seek explanation, and explore on your own. If you like a song - follow up on the artist's wider work (and not just their most popular songs or albums) and explore artists they collaborated with. Often you will come up with surprising results. Learn to listen to whole bodies of musical work (albums, album cycles, whole catalogues of a given artist, related cycles of work by multiple artists), not just single songs - this really limits the scope of what you get exposed to and the depth of your potential enjoyment of an artist's work. Have a sense of time and history of music - try to understand the influences of artists, and explore these influences, or other artists influenced by the same influences; try to get a sense for different genres and sub-genres, and figure out why generic labels don't always work. Go see concerts that people recommend you, with friends if possible. Finally, support your favourite artists and invest time, attention and cash into them if you can. Get "stuck" on an artist or two - contrary to popular belief, it's a very useful thing to do. It makes you more invested into music generally and builds up your excitement for more than just random songs you can shuffle in and out. Become some artist's fanboy - it's a very useful experience in music appreciation generally, and will serve your attitude towards music well in the future.

Looking over my compulsive chart of listening statistics for last 6 months, I come up with the following:

of my 20 most favourite artists,

-1 is my dad
-6 were directly introduced to me by my dad at some point in the past
-6 more I found by relation to artists introduced to me by my dad
-4 were introduced to me by .org friends (Flint the Dwarf and jasper-isis, 2 by each)
-I found 1 more by relation to one of the above
-finally, 2 I found through (Russian) AMVs

So while my music taste is rather eclectic and a bit eccentric, it's really not as out-there as some people might think. I've simply grown up around great music, while the AMV community helped a little in terms of opening up my mind to newer, more contemporary music than I would know from my family. However a large chunk of this comes through my own exploration of relations and wider catalogues - for example, my dad showed me about 2-3 albums by King Crimson and Akvarium (which is about his extent of listening to those two). My listening catalogue for those two artists now numbers 104 and 75 albums respectively, which I enjoy widely and thoroughly.

So basically - get cues from people whose tastes you trust, and then go off and explore. Do the work, dig around, don't be lazy, listen patiently - it always pays off!

[lynit]

I read books about music history.

[seasons]

Yeah, being a voracious reader of magazines, websites, and record guides certainly helps. If you don't enjoy the process of learning about music and hunting it down outside of the normal ways you consume it, you likely won't find anything new or different to get excited about.

There's nothing wrong with enjoying radio and MTV but getting to know Last.fm, Rateyourmusic.com, and subscribing to a few interesting blogs (use Google Reader and you'll never run out of reading material) is the best way to discover any interesting or exciting new music. Go grab some CDs while you're at the library, get to know some classic rock or even classic composers and you'll start to hear everything else in a different way. Keep checking out AMVs with music you don't know as well, you never know what you'll find next.