I was a party talking about music with some guy and when I threw out an obscure cover of a song, he said “You must read music blogs.” Should I have been offended? No. He knew another music nerd when he saw one. Here’s how to stay up with what the cool kids are listening to.
Get Hyped
I used to try to regularly check the music blogs I stumbled upon. Then I graduated to google reader to manage them all in the same place (more on that later). I was still bogged down with posts of music festival and artists I’ll never get into. Don’t follow this evolution. Make your life easier – use hype machine.

What’s great: You’ll be in tune to the latest singles released from your favorite artists, new artists that are blowing up, and rare/live/remixed original tracks and covers. One day the tracks will be on a music blog for you to download at your leisure and the next they will be archived history. The top music blogs post several entries a day, but this way you can browse the masses.
One day I went through a “Bring On Home To Me” phase…now I have something like 5 versions of it, simply by searching that track in the database of music blogs. The accessibility is crazy. I saw Where The Wild Things Are and was able to come home and download “All Is Love” from a dozen blogs. I feel like I should hold two thumbs up and say, thanks hype machine!
Scrobble, Scrobble
I’ve been singing the praises of Last.fm since I signed up a few years ago. It’s another great place to find new music and engage with other fans. You can tag songs you like in the last.fm scrobbler – a silly name for a great application that tracks the songs you listen to and provides a bio on the artist.

What’s great: You can also create playlists, listen to recommended tracks, stream radio stations and post on friend’s walls. I love the stats the best. You choose the range of time (last 7 days, last 3 months, etc.) and they will display your top listened tracks and artists. One thing that scared me was the fact I couldn’t hide the embarrassing tracks I listened to, but you learn to embrace it (or just disable scrobbling.) It also will download played tracks from your iPod if you select that option.
Google Even Reads For You
Google reader is a compilation of RSS feeds. If you don’t know what those are, you really better learn. Feeds are just a way of saying the latest information uploaded to a website. They are the quickest way to get this information from a big bulky website such as the New York Times. NYT has several feeds based on your preference. If you only wanted to read their political sections, for instance, you could decide on that option. You’ll usually see an orange icon like the one below on websites that want you to subscribe to their feed.

What’s great: I love the mix I can read. I skim through the national news headlines, an environmental consumer blog (seems like an oxymoron, I know), my brother’s personal blog, Postsecret postcards, a photoblog, etc. It allows so much variety and a lot less clicking and navigating. It can be frustrating to wait for things to load, but overall you can get through much more. You can then share items with your google contacts.
Go play! The internet is your playground and it’s full of free mp3s and information!













