One of the things I hear my friends complain about all the time is how their iPod playlists have become stale and how they desperately need new tunes, but have run out of ideas on where to go to discover new music. I’m pretty sure a lot of you have been in that situation yourself – looking for the right soundtrack for a dinner party, making a long road trip less boring, or setting the right mood for a romantic night. How do you discover new music? Well, fellow Stumblers, StumbleUpon is here to the rescue! Here are some of my favorite methods that I’ve been using to discover new music with the help of StumbleUpon.
1. Discover Music with StumbleUpon Video
My favorite way to discover music on StumbleUpon is through StumbleUpon’s own video player. On your toolbar, click on All Topics and select Videos. This will take you to StumbleUpon Video, a part of our service dedicated to stumbling only videos. Click on Channels in the menu beneath the video you’re watching and you’ll be able to start stumbling videos in any of your favorite topics. Make sure you have some music topics selected on your Interests page; from there on, the sky’s the limit!
While stumbling in StumbleUpon Video I discovered this amazing battling celloists video.
Using this method I’ve discovered and collected many songs, saving them under my own custom “songoftheday” tag, which includes great finds such as two cellists playing a cover of Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal.”
2. StumbleThru Last.fm, 8tracks or Pandora
Popular music discovery sites like Pandora, Last.fm or 8tracks have gigantic online repositories of music and recommend new songs, but I personally find myself stuck with the same few stations on repeat. To start a new station, I’d have to type the name of a new artist, but what if nothing comes to mind? I wanted to try something new, but didn’t know where to start. A few months ago, StumbleUpon added 2,000 domains to its StumbleThru feature, where you can stumble only pages from a particular domain. The exciting part for music buffs is that Last.fm, 8Tracks and Pandora are among those 2000 domains! To get that awesome stumblin’ started, thumb-up an 8tracks.com page, click on the “more” button and select “from this domain: 8tracks.com.” Now you will stumble only 8tracks playlists, one after another. Make sure to thumb-up the ones you like, so you can find them later in your Favorites.
3. Great Music Sites I Discovered with StumbleUpon
Another way to discover music on StumbleUpon is simply by stumbling in the Music topic from your toolbar. This is how I came across the sites that I will be introducing below. These sites are popular with Stumblers, but in case you haven’t stumbled them already, we hope we were able to bring something new to your ears.
Stereomood
With over 400,000 stumbles, this site is already a StumbleUpon darling. I keep seeing “thank you for showing this to me” tweets every day. Stereomood was founded in Rome and allows you to listen to playlists that match a certain emotion. According to the site creators, Stereomood is “the emotional internet radio, providing music that best suits your mood and activities.” You can choose from lists made for a sunny day, candlelit dinner, sunday morning, being dreamy, spring cleaning and, of course, “making love” (the site is run by Italians, after all.)
What mood are you in? Click on the right keyword and start listening to songs fit for that mood.
We Are Hunted
By using semantic search and aggregation technology, We Are Hunted listens to what people are saying about artists on their music blogs, social networks, message boards and forums to chart the top songs online every day. They want to be a daily destination for music lovers looking to discover their next favorite artist.
Shuffler.Fm
Shuffler.Fm’s slogan, “Channel surf the music web,” intrigued me so I took it for a spin. This site offers a fun way to navigate through thousands of music blogs. It’s like an Internet radio station that allows you to shuffle through music blogs. Shuffler aggregates music from around the web, bringing you a homepage with a list of radio-like channels categorized by genre. When you click on a channel, it sends you to a blog post and starts playing one of the songs mentioned on that post. If you don’t like it, you can skip ahead or pick another channel from the shuffler bar on the top of the page. When the song ends, they send you to the next song on a new blog within the same music channel that you picked.
RCRD LBL
What’s special about RCRD LBL is that it provides free, curated and legal MP3 downloads from the hottest emergent artists through its content partners. Driven by its taste-making editorial and curatorial teams, RCRD LBL features over 25,000 free singles, remixes, exclusive tracks and rarities from a diverse, handpicked roster of artists including Santigold, Steve Aoki, Moby, Massive Attack, MGMT and thousands more. Additionally RCRD LBL‘s network of affiliated content partners includes well respected labels such as Warp Records, Ghostly International, Dim Mak, Fool’s Gold and Modular. Get a taste of what’s new and download free music without feeling guilty about it.
Soul Sides
For the lovers of soul and jazz music, I recommend Soul Sides, a reputed soul blog that has been around since 2003. The blog started posting audio files in 2004 and since then they’ve been regularly reviewing records and allowing free downloads. Most songs are available for download for about 10 days. Oliver Wang, the blog’s creator, also writes for NPR, the LA Times and Wax Poetics.
4. Stumble by Keyword
And finally here’s another way you can discover music on StumbleUpon: by stumbling by a keyword. This feature is currently available only for users who have StumbleUpon for Firefox installed, but the good news is that we’re very close to making it available to all of our clients. To stumble by keyword you have to first add the Search/Tag box to your toolbar. It should look like the screenshot below. Then, type something in the box (1 or 2 words provide best results) and click Stumble! I have a special affinity for accordion music, so I gave this a try and found some really good songs and musicians, such as Dave Thomas, who does a great job at covering Yann Tiersen in this video.
I hope you enjoyed this post and learned a few new ways to navigate around StumbleUpon that will help you steer our powerful recommendation engine to where you want it to go. I’d love to hear from you and especially to find out if there’s a particular music site or musician that you discovered with StumbleUpon. Also, if you are a musician and got a lot of traffic from StumbleUpon, give us a shout! Take a minute and leave a comment on this post about your experience with discovering music or getting discovered on StumbleUpon.