We swear, there's no reading required to expand your musical horizons these days. Well...aside from this article, at least.
(Credit: Donald Bell/CNET Networks)
When you're young, new music is everywhere: radio, Facebook profiles, borrowed iPods, or even burned CDs. It's not hard to find tunes you love. The music appetites of 13- to 21-year-olds are voracious and the consequences of being musically unhip can be punishing.
Then something happens: you get older; work a full-time job; get married; have a mortgage; have children; adopt a particularly demanding parrot; and so on. You wake up one day and realize your taste in music hasn't budged since your early '20s and the prospect of discovering good, new music now seems like an overwhelming chore, fraught with disappointment. I know, I'm living proof.
We're all familiar with the long, depressing list of activities that seemed easy in youth that now take effort. Fortunately, finding good music isn't as tough as working off that middle-age gut. Since its inception, the Internet has helped us--mostly illegally--discover new music. Finally, tools for legal and efficient online music discovery are hitting their stride.
To help you help yourself, we've collected our favorite techniques to help the lazy, hurried, or unhip (or, face it, aging) connect with good, new music.
... Read moreThe team behind the popular browser extension FoxyTunes is hard at work on a new mashup site that integrates the music controls of FoxyTunes with an aggregation tool to give you more information and media about your favorite musical artists and new discoveries.
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CNET Networks)
Each FoxyTunes Planet artist page has several customizable widgets. There are Flickr photos, YouTube videos, albums for sale from Amazon, and even various Internet radio stations such as HypeMachine and Last.fm where you can listen to the band's other songs. If you're like me, you might be listening to a Shoutcast feed on iTunes and come across an artist you like but aren't familiar with. If you have FoxyTunes installed, clicking the little Planet button brings up the artist's page on FoxyTunes Planet.
If you want to find out more about a band that you're not currently listening to, the FoxyTunes Planet site uses a simple search interface that returns artist pages, in a system akin to Google's. Results are fast and even obscure artists are likely to return some information. If you want to add more widgets to the results page, there are currently 12 others to choose from. Rearranging them on the artist page is accomplished by simply dragging and dropping.
FoxyTunes Planet is a handy tool for music discovery. You could accomplish something similar using an aggregator like Netvibes, but the seamless integration with FoxyTunes makes sense. FoxyTunes Planet is in private beta; you can sign up here. You can download the original FoxyTunes for Firefox or FoxyTunes for Internet Explorer at CNET Download.com.
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