Truffling around

Where do you find your music? Yes, I know, you go to the CD rack and there it is. Or, if you are as obsessed as some of us, you go into almost any room in the house and there is a pile of the stuff, because you can’t get rid of any of it, even the long-unplayed mid-period Elvis Costello CDs of everyone’s worst nightmares. But that’s not what I mean. Where do you find your new music, the stuff you haven’t heard before? There’s a vast quantity out there, waiting to be discovered. Where do you go looking for it?

If you have very mainstream tastes, of course, you’re fine. The major record labels, although collapsing in a heap around us, persist in launching new artists who they hope will appeal to millions and millions of people. Almost everyone in the world who sounds a bit like Amy Winehouse has been signed up and is currently in the studio ‘laying down tracks’.