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I think they are more intended as a final destination although it probably would be in their interest to offer previews of music, it's a shame they don't.

On the other hand you are likely to hear the music they sell on the excellent Resonance FM (very eclectic so consult the listings if you don't like what you hear at first) I personally like "The Wire's Adventures in Modern Music" and "The Bermuda Triangle" on Thursday nights and also "Scratching The Surface" on alternate Tuesdays. Also the listed shop Rough Trade plays the best of their new stock every Thursday at noon (GMT) on Resonance FM.

As a side note The Wire is a great, independent, guide to new music -- the down side is you have to buy it though ;-).

Although if you ask many early Detroit house and techno artists, they will cite European influences such as Kraftwerk and Depeche Mode. The Wire Magazine had some interviews with some of the people on the early Detroit scene.

Sites like Epitonic and Parasol have steaming audio and are not 'radio' per se. Parasol is a distributor and Epitonic is a site like MP3.com but with a more condensed selection of signed indie artists (not the myriad of DIY stuff that might be fun to wade through at MP3.com, but since you said google was dense, then this is a valid comment). Epitonic's radio stream is cool because you can listen to what they have programmed or 'walk through' genre, labels etc or create a playlist for the broadcast.

Allmusic is very good at guiding yo to stuff you might like. By checking roots, influences, followers and similar artist of an act that you like you might stumble on some new stuff.

Weblogs, forums... of course.

Then there is the old reliable. Magzines, college radio and record store clerks.

Some of my favorite mags: Magnet, Wire, Signal to Noise and CMJ.

You must have some local college stations... some of them do internet streaming if there is none near you. Local to me (Northampton, MA) there is WAMH and WMUA.

There are a few great record stores that send out new release emails of obscure titles. Also, they have employee lists. I have bought many titles without listen by looking at the employee lists. If 10 people that work in the store say it is great, then it more than likely is. Here are two great stores on each coast: Forced Exposure in Boston (click on "Employee Top 10") & Aquarius Records in San Fran (click on "Favorites" for each employee)... for both sites, sign up for the email updates for weekly new releases.

If anyone is into Free Jazz, check out my site.

Some hints to get you started: First start to read "The Wire", which is not "Wired" (go to The Wire). It's a magazine that knows what happens from month to month. Subscribe, get the subscribers-only CDs they send you, find out what you like, and explore. Don't listen to people who tell you that Trance is the big one these days, or that their old heroes have defined your listening future.

Buy samplers with different artists on it. One that fits the topic is Electronic 01. Try also the Click'n'Cuts compilation series.

Go to festivals like Sonar, Ars Electronica and Mutek, or at least find out what's hot there.

Follow as many leads as you can, be open-minded.

Check out special interest web shops and sites like Brainwashed, .

What you will find is probably that European, especially German, and Japanese artists are pretty much top of the line these days, but that this keeps changing. My most used line at Sonar this year was "We can see that, at least they're German".

Oh yeah, and the recent "Wired" article about electronic music was about five years out of date.

Noise, all.

In a more geekie manner; there is Kraftwerk. Difficult to grasp, very cold at first but if you dig a little bit into it, you will find it pretty warm. Personnaly, I find the album Computer World a excellent start, and if you code, you will find the lyrics pretty funny like : It's more fun to compute or I program my home computer, Beam my self into the future. It's kind of cool to listen to that and making a modification in a Makefile ... Very powerful album. I find it kind of cool of acting like a robot and listening to kraftwerk. Everything at it's right place.

If you are more in a texture mode, check out Board of Canada. You can think of a weird 8mm film of the '70 put into music. Great for Cobol and Mainframe programming.

If your are on Visual Basic and you are frustrated, you can put Neu !/Neu ! 2. It's rock from the '70, but the beat is sooo techno... still ahead of it's time... It has influence so many artists.

In something more funky, check Mouse On Mars. It's very noisy, but still have the genius to put the melody into it. The music to listen with Python or Perl.

As for the documentation, Fennesz [Endless Summer] is great ambiant music. Acoustic guitar put into small repeated samples. So beautiful that you will forget that you are making documentation. This is the next logical step to Eno.

To learn more about electronic music, the The Wire is a excellent source...

It's got great reviews of a lot of cutting edge electronic music, plus lots of other stuff. Really good.

Check out their website: http://www.thewire.co.uk/.

Okay, before you give me a response, I've heard these things before:

Point- It helps us understand what other music we'd be interested in and find it.
Rebuttal- Why don't we compare musicians to other musicians? That's more accurate and would probably get us closer to something we'd like. Frankly, there are more similarities between say, some Aphex Twin and Stockhausen than Aphex Twin and Moby, but they are lumped together and you are less likely to find out about Stockhausen than Moby because of that. That's a shame, because Moby sucks balls ;). You are going to enjoy music more if you throw those categories out the window and just listen.

Point- By putting things in genres, you can understand the lineage of music.
Rebuttal- This is true only to a point. Unfortunately I think it's been a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because we've had these categories people have started classifying themselves and putting themselves willingly into little boxes. Remember though that the great musicians didn't give a shit about these categories...Coltrane, Coleman, Mingus, etc. weren't out to create 'Free Jazz,' they were just bringing in aspects of their culture and other cultures together. That's a much more broad-minded grasp of music. The really funny thing to me that people do today is take little bits and pieces of different genres very consciously and try to call it something new, they categorize it before it's even out there. "Yeah, it's my new Funk/Jungle/Experimental Digital Hardcore/Polka band!" Why not just play some fucking music??

Anyways, this is a brief digression for a nerd site like this, but thought it'd be interesting to get some REAL discussion going about musical styles.

BTW, I have to ditto the poster above who said that the article was little more than an ad for Macs. I guess more generally it was an illustration that Wired probably shouldn't be doing pieces on music. Or they should realize that the technology is just a tool, no matter how much it has empowered people to create new music. For real music coverage, instead check out The Wire.

Sure, I could find good independent music on the internet too, if I had the time to wade through lots of crap. Thus my question: how do you find good independent music without wading through lots of crap? Admittedly, having to wade through some crap is inevitable, as each person's definition of "crap" varies with taste. I'd like to listen to more independent music, but I don't have the time to listen to twenty bands I don't like in order to find one I do.

A lot of college radiostations are (still?) broadcast on the internet. Many of them are really independant: the DJs are largely free to follow their own interests. All you have to do is find one adventurous DJ whose taste you trust, and you've got a pipeline feeding you with more good, new stuff than you can possibly deal with.

(The station I'm involved with is KZSU, the Stanford radio station, but I'd need to know more about what kind of music you're after before I could recommend a particular show on the air.)

Another thing you can do is find a site/zine/magazine that you can more or less trust. Most of the slick glossies are pretty clearly sold-out to the crap machine, but even so I can think of things like The Wire (note, not "-ed"). This is a UK based magazine that in my opinion does a great job of covering interesting music almost without regard to genre (e.g. some recent issues have focused on Sigur Ros, Talvin Singh, and John Cale).

Another move of course, is to look for news groups and mailing lists that talk about stuff you're interested in. Just drop in and say "I like *Foo*, where do I find more?" (Though you need to be prepared to be flamed if you ask about "Nine Inch Nails" on rec.music.industrial or "Marilyn Manson" on alt.gothic).