I don’t visit record stores nearly as much as I used to because there is just not enough hours in the day. Early 2000s before there were so many music websites, blogs, directories and apps I used to mainly check favorite record labels like Fania, Trojan, Tru Thoughts, Six Degrees, Studio One, Strut, Soul Jazz, Tuff Gong and stores like Dusty Groove and Juno. As I began to dj more and more in New York City with dj nyc and various other gigs it became more challenging to keep up with everything.
KCRW and KEXP have been consistently great, particularly Jeremy Sole’s Branches show on KCRW and Kid Hops on KEXP. Sirius and XM have been decent although the format of having all Sinatra or all Indie or all Goth 80s is a little stale, they need to create more shows where people mix a larger range of music within one show to keep it interesting. I haven’t kept up with them enough to know whether or not they’ve done this. Brooklyn Vegan has a great article on getting Spotify playlists and recommendations and is a great jumping off point as an alternative to Pandora and Itunes if you want to find new music.
August 3, 2011
Crate digging, Vinyl