The music discovery process

Way earlier this year-- like, trendy earlier-- my friends tried to introduce me to Does It Offend You, Yeah? and their awesome debut LP. They're everything I ask for from a band: Electro, from Europe, and etc. Yet, it's taken me several months to finally give them a chance, fall in love, and throw "Dawn of the Dead" on repeat for hours on end. I find myself in these sorts of situations all the time. In fact, most of the bands that have made a huge impact on my life (Interpol, Bloc Party, and Justice, to name a few) sat around on my computer for months before I got around to listening and eventually obsessing.

I've been wondering if maybe my methodology for sampling new music is all wrong.

For as long as I can remember I've been slyly shifting between Pitchfork, last.fm, Pandora, and the other music blogs to pick up on new bands as soon as they blip on the radar. After listening to a new album once-around, I plug my initial reaction into a very complicated second-order differential equation. Then I decide whether it warrants another listen or should be shelved for further fermentation. Eventually, shelved albums get re-listened or cleared out during my periodic NEED MOAR SPACE TO STORE PORN purges.

And how do you listen to the new bands once they're in your music library? I tend to just throw the album into Winamp and listen to it straight-through and make my judgment. Some of my friends do this three albums at a time, on shuffle, in order to discover their favorite songs out of the new collection of albums. And some people just try each track one-at-a-time.

My process has worked wonders for bands like Animal Collective. Strawberry Jam was all the buzz when it landed on the 'sphere, and yet my intuition was to let the album slide because it was nothing but repetitive noise and nonsense. And so, it sat on my computer for months until someone (probably Cristina or another self-loathing Pitchfork reader like me) made a comment about the "Peacebone" video being incredibly trippy. I gave the album a second chance, decided that "Peacebone" was the only thing worth saving, and tossed the rest of the album to make room for scissoring redheads. And it worked for Fleet Foxes, too-- you don't see me talking about them too much.

Friends are definitely the most dependable way to find music you like. But I also get a pretty big kick out of finding bands myself and disseminating them upon the masses. So, masses, how do you get into new music? Is it all friend-driven, or are you at the aristocratic whims of the music blogs?