There are a few different ways to explore new music and artists.

You could listen to traditional radio, free, but ruined by too many commercials. Sirius and XM offer commercial free stations in many different genres but you’ll need a player and a monthly subscription ($$$). In the last few years there has been an explosion of online music sites like Pandora and last.fm which are good free options.

What if you already have a favorite artist and would simply like a list of related artists? Try entering in the artist into the Music Artist Cloud and a page will be returned with a tag cloud of similar artists and links to YouTube videos. Along the right you can see what a search for Quiet Riot returns.

There is the less technical way of talking to friends and family members. Yesterday was my sister in law’s 21st birthday and she wanted a CD by a group I hadn’t heard before called Living Syndication. We played it in the car as we spent the day taking her to all those got to be 21 sin places.

Today, I bought Living Syndication Aneurythm (affiliate) at Amazon MP3 for $8.99 which contains one of my new favorite songs: “Love Your Disease.”

Way down, you gotta live to breathe,
way down, you gotta love your disease

There is a short clip of them playing the song live below at YouTube.

Nice cowboy hat! My sis-in-law told me Living Syndication sounds a lot like the band Perfect Circle but the Music Artist Cloud oddly doesn’t recommend Perfect Circle. Sometimes it’s still best to go offline for related artist recommendations. I’m going to have to check out Perfect Circle too.

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