Find new music online for free

Traditionally, finding new music has involved talking to elitist record store clerks or spending your evenings at small gigs of dubious merit. No longer! Now you can track down interesting new artists from the comfort of your Windows Vista PC.

One place to start searching is by seeing what music your friends on your network have shared via Windows Media Player 11 (you’ll see them appear in your Library pane, or click Library > Media Sharing to configure your own musical social network). There’s also a world of raw talent out there to uncover on the web from blogs and dedicated new music sites...

MP3 blogs

A wider-ranging alternative to review sites. There are music blogs for pretty much every genre known to mankind, offering a few free tracks each day from new or lesser-known artists. While most blogs are good for relatively established bands, sites such as music for robots dig up really obscure stuff. There are also searchable music blog aggregators, such as The Hype Machine.

Review sites

Smart bands know the best way to sell records is to give them away, with the internet opening up a massive global audience for them. Big music sites such as Pitch Fork or allmusic.com accompany many of their reviews and interviews with a freely downloadable song or two from the artist in question. If the write-up sounds interesting, sample the music and then buy the record.

Last.fm

Hugely effective and achingly hip, this tiny application tracks the music you play in Windows Media Player. It then checks out the favourite music of other people who’ve played it and recommends bands and songs accordingly. Instant web pages are created for music ‘tagged’ with the same terms, so you can also socialise online with folk who are into the same stuff as you. Download it from LastFM.

Net radio

You don’t need a giant antenna and an expensive licence to broadcastonline, so there are thousands of web radio stations to sample. Stations such as BBC 6 Music and XFM are streamed online from their sites, as are others the world over. Click the Media Guide button in Windows Media Player and then select Radio from the list at the top. You’ll be offered a massive range of free stations from every genre to listen to.

MySpace

Loads of bands have a MySpace page and it’s a good place to go if you want to get a taste of a new album before shelling out cash for the CD or download as the bands often make songs available for listening via the audio player. Check out REM’s page to see how easy it is.