Music Hunters Alert! A new way to find great music.

This post is for the people who can't go a few days without an intense urge to download several new songs, who get excited when they have to drive somewhere because it gives them an opportunity to listen to music, who put on headphones and do nothing else but just listen, who play music in the background pretty much at all times, who can't live a day without listening to some type of melody--basically for people like me :)

It's hard to come by new music these days. So far, I have found 2 tried and true methods:
1) Find music buddies who share the same obsession with music that you do and make a pact to trade.
2) When buying/downloading songs, check out the "Customers who bought this artist also bought this..."

Unfortunately for me, my music collecting has slowed down quite a bit. It gets harder and harder to find new music that I like. Sometimes I only end up downloading less than a handful of songs a week, which is tough! I always like a good batch of 20 songs or more to keep me satisfied for a week or two, otherwise I'm just hungry for more. And my 2 methods have been completely sucked dry. First, I barely have any music buddies to begin with. And second, I hardly see them enough to trade. Then, for the "customers who bought this artist also bought this" trick, I think I've gone through just about every related artist there is.

I do subscribe to music magazines, but even those are a gamble; a lot of times the writers' tastes are pretty different than mine and I have to search each artist/song one by one for a sample on Amazon.com to see whether I like it. And sometimes when the clip is too short to tell, I go on Playlist.com and listen to the whole song just to make sure... Yeah, I'm pretty picky, but at $1.00 per song, I better be! Otherwise, I could easily spend hundreds of dollars a month buying up full albums.

Yeah, nobody ever said music hunting was easy. It's a real chore! But the end result is so worth it, which is why I do it. And now, I've just found a new way to music hunt and it's led me to a ton of new music so far.

And the trick is...

You Tube!
If you go on You Tube and look at "trailers" made by fans for books, movies, etc., they have some great music. The best part is they list the artist and song title for you right under the info, cutting out all of the work! I discovered this method by accident when I googled some info on Cassandra Clare, the author of The Mortal Instruments Trilogy (which I posted about earlier). There was a video for the City of Bones book trailer made by a fan. When I first watched it, I thought the fan had hired professional actors/actresses to play all the parts. Then I found out that she took scenes from about 8 different movies/tv series and did some creative editing which really reflected certain scenes in the book. I mean, it's pretty crazy--where the heck did she find a clip where a red-headed teenager and a brown-haired nerdy boy with glasses go to a club (Clary and Simon at club Pandemonium)? Or a handsome blonde boy (Jace) standing in a futuristic elevator (the Institute's elevator) talking to an elderly man (Hodge)? The only movie I recognized was 300, which made me realize how she had put the "trailer" together. But it was really well done and I have to commend her on a great job.
In fact, here is the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8WcRsajHfY&feature=PlayList&p=C0A8372A7AA378BD&index=0&playnext=1

I think if you've read the book/series, you will see just how close the trailer is to the actual book. (A glowing sword!)

It turns out that lots of people throw together fake trailers and use awesome music in the background. Stuff I've never even heard of! So hopefully this will help some of you out there who have been struggling to find new music. Happy hunting, everyone!