I haven’t done a music recommendations post for a good while – but stumbling upon Mixcloud the other day, it occurred to me this site has a lot of potential.
It’s an attempt to converge radio broadcasts, mixtapes and podcasts into the one search-friendly environment – and it works pretty well for finding stuff you haven’t heard yet.
Big media organisations can draw on the knowledge of professional researchers and experts, who will suggest suitable music for audio or visual packages. Trying to find an equivalent to this wisdom isn’t easy online, albeit searching LastFM for other people who share some of your tastes, and Amazon’s Listmania! lists can both help point you in interesting directions.
Mixcloud offers similar help – just search for an artist you know (you may need to filter the results, using the tabs above) and you’ll find plenty of mixtapes where that artist has been shoehorned amongst others – sure there’s no guarantees that everything will be useful, but I got some interesting results when searching for Serge (Gainsbourg) - including a few French psychedelia artists I’d never heard of before.
Not everyone’s cup of tea, mind – but there’s plenty of potential in here for most tastes.