Discovering music by triangulation

Green Man main stage
Photo licensed under creative commons.

This time last week I was at The Green Man Festival in a beautiful part of Wales, soaking up lots of music on the fringes of the new and old folk scenes (plus a moderate amount of rain, but not enough to spoil the weekend). Much of the fun is checking out the bands in the line-up of whom you haven't heard. But how do you choose which unknown act to see when there are two or three on at the same time?

A few days before the festival eMusic was formally launched in the UK, and I signed up for two-week trial with 25 free downloads. I started searching for some of the Green Man acts, and was delighted to find that a fellow user had already created a playlist of the acts at the festival. I used half my free downloads to try out some of these acts, with the intention of using the remainder to get more tracks from the acts I enjoyed at the festival (it hasn't quite worked out that way: instead I used the rest of my allocation exploring more new stuff, and 'saved for later' some of my favourite Green Man acts).

Having spent a couple of days auditioning some of the acts on my Mac, we arrived at the festival, and the opinions I'd formed got spliced with the recommendations of the friends who were camping with us.

It's all these 'inputs' together — auditioning sample tracks, word-of-mouth recommendations, and actually seeing the acts perform — that will guide my future purchases. You could call it a kind of discovery triangulation.

And of course more inputs keep arriving. I've been checking the lists of favourites on the Green Man message boards (requires free registration) and realising that I missed some great performances. You can't watch three stages at once.