Discovering new music due to podcasting

It occurred to me today that I've listened to more music that was new to me in the last six months than I probably have in the previous six years.

I think most of us get fixated on the music that we listened to over and over when we were in our late teens and college years. For me that meant the end of the sixties and early seventies. Led Zeppelin, Moody Blues, Rolling Stones, ELO, Uriah Heep, Traffic. A mixed bag of hard and not so hard rock and odd stuff done mixing symphonies with pop music. All on real honest to goodness records. LPs. Vinyl.

I repurchased a number of my favorites on CDs over the years. There is a slug of aging LPs still in a closet but the turntable has been relegated to the attic for at least eight years and had gone unused for quite a while before that.

So. New music. Radio has sucked down here on the Third Coast for quite a while. The last blow was the conversion of KLOL, the last rock station in the area, to Spanish. But even before the plug got pulled it had been in decline. Too many deejays who think the airwaves are for airing their personalities and not music. And I've turned into a cheap bastard in my old age. So I just can't "justify" spending twenty bucks give or take a few on a CD of someone I haven't heard on the off chance I might find a song or two I like.

So my music listening has declined down to my mostly legal collection of MP3s and Ogg files. And I guess I was slowly getting tired of the same old 5,000 tracks.

When along comes podcasting. The first music program I listened to and really enjoyed (and am still listening) is Dave Raven's "The Raven 'n' the Blues". From there I've branched out to several other blues shows recommended by Dave. And Closet Deadhead (no, I'm not a Deadhead but I did have a college roommate who was into the Dead in their "Country Dead" phase.) Also I've tried a couple of rock shows but I've been less happy with what I've found there. I think it's because the rock featured is "their" rock and not "mine". In other words it's the music that the podcasters listened to over and over when they were teenagers, mostly a decade or two later than me. Eighties hair bands and such. Ugh.

I was never into the blues when I was a kid but I sure am enjoying it now. Odd.

Updated: Gr... posted from the Blogger web UI. Would be nice if the preview had shown me that I left out all the paragraph breaks!