August 11, 2002

Discovering music: Sonomu, Epitonic

I’ve recently discovered sonomu.net (“SOund NOise MUsic”) which is a thoroughly cross-referenced repository of non-mainstream music (similar editorial policy to The Wire magazine, for example) — organised by artists, albums and lables, with reviews and .m3u streams of complete tracks (no downloads unfortunately), all in a wonderfully simple, fast design. Crossreferencing music you know with music you don’t is always a good way to discover new music. You can also listen to a random selection of tracks from the site as a radio stream.

You need to register to use it, requiring only email address and a non-valuable password (they email it back to you in plain text).

It’s a good companion to epitonic.com, still my favourite site for discovering music. Like sonomu, epitonic also showcases mostly little-known bands (which is probably how these sites can afford to be so generous), meticulously organised over dozens of genres, and cross-referenced to within an inch of their lives. Very usefully, the cross-referencing also includes better-known bands that aren’t in the epitonic catalogue, but you are more likely to recognise.

In functionality epitonic leaves sonomu (and most other music sites) far behind. All tracks are complete, and are downloadable as well as streamable (MP3 and M3U respectively). The “stream this page” feature, when browsing genres, is fantastic. It also has an excellent “black box / playlist” facility, allowing you to save stuff you like and create playlists from it, which you can email to friends, or just set up a day’s worth of listening.

Not sure yet how much of an overlap there is between the two sites’ catalogues.

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