I wrote that post when I looked at three things: 1) how much money I spend on music each month (currently more than $20), 2) how much time I spend listening to music each month, and 3) how much time I spend looking for new music each month.

Then I realized I spend a fair bit of time listening to music away from my computer (commuting, at the gym, etc). I figured it would be nice if I could use this time to find new music. You see, when I buy music, it usually isn't because it's what I set out to do. It happens because I hear a song that is good enough for me to stop what I'm doing and investigate.

If my phone had the battery life that allowed my to use the last.fm or pandora apps more or less continuously, that might get me pretty close. (I should probably give this another try.)

But here is what I find myself doing... There are a number of sites that scan the music blogs for mp3 posts and condense them down to a single source. I see those (passively) in my twitter stream. This makes it easy to sample songs quickly in my browser. Ones that interest me get downloaded and end up in a special playlist in iTunes. This playlist syncs to my iPod. These songs get cleaned out and moved into another playlist once a week. About once a month or so, I go through this playlist and look for songs that I've given high star ratings too or have played >N times. I then go checkout those artists to see if I should be buying their music.

I've found a lot of good artists this way. If this seems like a lot of work, it probably is. I spend 10 hrs a day coding at work and I have more fun doing that when I'm listening to music I like, so I'm motivated to spend time and money on this problem.