With so many great websites online containing an abundance of opportunities to find and listen to new music there’s no shortage of options, but is there room for a few apps to find their way into your kit bag too.
Having scoured the available apps and tested them for their ability to put you as close as possible to the ticking beat of great new music here’s our take on the best of the bunch.
YouTube
YouTube might only be eight years old, but it’s been a go-to source of pretty much everything since day one. The app is just as resourceful as its bigger brother and there are a few simple ways to use it to find great new music. The first option is to select the Music section in the menu and check out the latest videos. There’s always a fairly eclectic mix of videos, but at the moment you’d find Arctic Monkeys’ One for the Road and Paul McCartney’s Queenie Eye, so there’s always the odd one or two new tracks for your to listen to.
However, a more targeted approach would be to use the app’s search function. Simply type in your search, e.g. “rock music”, and use the settings to find the latest uploads. Refine your search by view count or rating and an upload date of today, this week or this month and you get to see the most popular or highly rated rock music videos uploaded to YouTube recently. Then it’s just a case of watching the videos to find the ones you love, which you can use to build up a subscription list of YouTubers that regularly upload great new music.
Soundcloud
Soundcloud is literally filled with new music, as up and coming artists and bands upload their best work in a bid to get their tracks heard. While there’s a fair amount of lower quality music on Soundcloud, there are also a lot of hidden gems to find. Our recent discoveries have included Quasi, See You On Mars, Big Deal, Mona and Maria and Parquet Courts.
There are a few easy ways to find them too. The first is to simply search for bands that you like and start to follow them. When they upload new music to listen to they’ll be added to your feed chronologically, so you get to listen to their latest uploads as soon as they’re put up. The second is to use the Who To Follow function to get suggestions about who to follow and add to your feed.
Rormix
Rormix is the only app we could find that’s entirely dedicated to new music. Simply choose a genre of music and it presents you with a raft of videos to listen to, which you can sort by their freshness and their trending status, so you can flick between the very latest music from the genre to the most popular new uploads. There’s also a daily shuffle of random tracks to swathe through from the whole mix of musical genres and you can Like artists, so you can get back to their music easily and listen to their latest uploads.
The other cool feature that Rormix provides is in its unique search function, which it calls Discover. Instead of just searching for a band you know and listening to their music, with this you enter searches for artists that you like and it’ll search for similar music for you to sample. It can be a bit hit and miss with lesser known bands, but we reckon as more musicians and listeners start to use Rormix this function will start to develop improved search results.
Music top 100s hits
This is a cool app to find the latest hits from around the world. Essentially it’s an up-to-date listing of the top 100 singles from countries from around the world. It’s got a lot of range too, so you can find all sorts of random tracks to try out from far-flung climbs like Brazil, New Zealand, Fiji and Nepal. There’s also the likes of the UK, US and Canada top 100s to listen to as well as the potential of musical hot spots like Italy, Sweden, Spain and Russia.
While some of the singles you’ll find on this app will have a certain comic appeal, which adds to the fun of it, there’s definitely scope to use it to find great new music. The only downside is that you only get to listen to a sample of the tracks, but you can then click on a link to download those you like from iTunes.
Your favorite radio station
A lot of radio stations have their own app now, so having your favorite station on your phone is a must to make sure you can listen to the type of new music that you love, no matter where you are. For any stations you that don’t have their own app there are aggregator radio apps that contain the majority of them. For example, TuneIn Radio has everything from K-Rock Europe to Indie 103.1 (US) and you can browse stations by genre and location. However, there isn’t a free text search option to directly locate a station, so you’re sometimes left at the mercy of what you can find.
The Great apps to find and listen to new music post was written by the editor of the music news section of Tuppence Magazine – http://tuppencemagazine.co.uk/entertainment-news/category/music/music-news/.