What's This Music For?

Your local entertainment magazines or websites can be a good source of information about local music.  We have two that I’m aware of in our area of northeast Tennessee, The Loafer and GoTricities.  Both have weekly listings of what bands are playing at which venues, plus occasional articles spotlighting local talent.  However, the online presence of GoTricities, which is, of course, Gotricities.com, has quite a bit more to offer the music fan.  The music section on the site has several nice features.  One is a listing of local/regional bands, broken down by genre; each band on the site has a photo, blurb, and links to their own site(s).  Unfortunately, this list is not necessarily up-to-date or complete, which is understandable; as quickly as bands come and go, the staff maintaining the site have an almost impossible job of maintaining all the information themselves.  It’s ultimately up to each band to request that they be added to or removed from the site.  Within its limits, though, it’s a good birds-eye view of the local music scene.

Another feature of the site is Radio GoTricities, which features streaming audio of various bands’ material.  You can play all genres, a sampler, or only a specific genre.  This is a nice feature, but unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be updated very often, and I’m not sure how much it’s used.  It’s a shame, because it’s a nice feature.

And speaking of shames, GoTricities also hosts a set of forums, collectively called “The Buzz”, which has fallen into disuse.  At one time this was a good place to get the inside scoop on what was happening in the local music scene, but for whatever reason, posts are few and far between these days.  Additionally, there are sections containing music videos and reviews, but these also appear to be neglected these days.

Despite its shortcomings, and the air of abandon that hangs over parts of the site, GoTricities.com is still a valuable resource for those interested in our local music scene.

In this first of who knows how many posts, I’m going to explore ways of discovering independent artists online, with a special interest in discovering local and regional music.  The two tools that most people seem to use, Pandora and Spotify, don’t particularly cater to or accommodate up-and-coming musicians; they focus more on big names on major labels.  Although independent musicians can make their music available through these services (Chameleon Red is on Spotify, for instance), it’s unlikely that they’ll ever pop up on whatever “radio” you’re listening to.  So I’m searching for other tools; the first one I’ll cover is ReverbNation.

ReverbNation.com is a great resource for independent musicians; you can set up a page, upload music and get all kinds of neat tools to integrate with web pages, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc., for free.  There are also some really nice premium services.  For music fans, the site offers some handy features, but also has some annoying shortcomings.

On the plus side, it’s easy to locate local artists; they even have charts for different genres of music.  The charts are based on popularity.  You can see info on each artist, and if available, buy the music from the artist’s page.  You can see a calendar of upcoming shows in the area and who’s playing, too.  It’s also easy to listen to artists at a nationwide or global level, so you can discover new music from all over.  While you’re listening, you can click around and explore different parts of the site while the music continues to play, which is nice.

On the minus side, right now it’s impossible to play the entire local chart for a particular genre, though I’m pretty sure that feature was there in the past.  So you have to click on each song individually, which is a pain.  Also, the top couple of chart positions seem to be occupied by non-local artists; I’m not sure what’s going on with that.  Setting up a custom playlist seems a little flaky right now, too.

All in all, ReverbNation is awesome for artists and is a good resource for discovering the artists in your neighborhood, though it could stand improvement from a listener’s perspective.

If you know of other sites that are helpful in discovering independent musical artists, please share them with us!

Chameleon Red on ReverbNation