Where are the prophets?

Of course I don't really need to tell you any of this stuff, you know it already, but I was reminded of him and forced to think about how we all discover new music by a couple of random events in the last few weeks.

Firstly there was my own recommendation of The Heavy which drew appreciation from the SM staffers. The Heavy are a band on their second album, I had heard the single twice played by the soon departing Jonathon Ross on Radio 2 and hunted it down. Frankly it troubled me that I'd not heard of them previously as I used to think I was 'in touch' but this aside I was gratified that I wasn't on my own.

I was also pleased - to some degree - that a band can still mature and progress, and release two albums in relative obscurity. I'm still not sure how they manage to feed and clothe themselves in that time, but it's good to know it can be done.

My concern is how I'd not come across them earlier and still haven't really seen them widely written about. I can't claim to listen to a wide variety of radio stations but I do consume a lot of media generally which leads me to come across a bundle of acts I'd rather not have known about.

I may have made numerous references in the past year about not knowing how bands break through to get some visibility these days. It still seems that money talks loudest and you have to have some backing to be noticed at all. I hear a lot about social media and how bands are going to talk directly to their fans, there's no doubt that they have to - but they need to cultivate some fans in the first instance.

So, who do we trust to do this? Where are the arbiters who are going to bring through the next generation of acts? I have some belief that the networks will eventually take shape but currently it's all too fractured and too limited in number. My daughter might be in a facebook/myspace/whatever network of emo-goth-rock fans but I suspect that all they do is pick up on very similar bands, most of whom will have already broken through.

Probably these people do still exist, there are probably even more of them than before - it's another problem of the diversification and proliferation of different media: more niche programming means that there could well be three people on Radio 1 and Kerrang, maybe even five on 6 Music doing the same job that Peel did almost solely. I'm not sure though, it's more likely that they think they're doing it but they're only really scratching the surface.

This is the problem; it's actually quite hard work to find new stuff to champion. Everyone says they're the best - you can only listen to so much at any one time and you tend to focus on stuff that's been well reviewed elsewhere, believing that there's 'no smoke without fire'. As I said, I used to do it for Radio WM at one time and there really weren't enough hours in the day.

There were random occasions when you'd come across something truly unexpected (I vividly recall the first time I heard Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit) but even more times when I archly neglected to listen to something the record label kept nagging me about - which unfortunately turned out to be Radiohead's Creep.

We're all a bit sheep-like when it comes down to it; we need a shepherd to lead us. I had too few followers to make any impact on WM but it may be that smaller local markets will emerge - the ultimate realisation of the very long tail. I don't know if anywhere else has emerged since the Leeds & Sheffield boom, having stopped taking much notice of the NME. In the end their problem became that they said 'everything was the next big thing', losing their credibility when a lot of that stuff turned out to be crap.

So, given that the future is peer-to-peer dominated I shouldn't be surprised that most of the recent bands I've discovered have come via friends. This said I was a bit put out that my genius-singer-songwriter-mate in New York managed to pick up on a Manchester band before me, when I'm in England working for UK music radio stations. Anyway, as a result of Chris, my latest favourite new band is Everything Everything

I have always relied on a few key friends to recommend acts to me. They're mates and you expect them to have like-tastes, which generally they do. Net based recommendation sites have some way to go yet though, it's not quite enough just to recommend an artist's entire catalogue just because you bought one song, I think I could've worked that out myself. I understand that last.fm and similar services are supposed to be pretty good but I still think we need a Peel-type figure that we can trust to sift the platinum from the poop. .

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