Best way to hear what you've never heard, listen

When we brainstormed our “Best of What You’ve Never Heard Of” music list, our hardly rigid guidelines were as follows: nothing too popular, too old or too new.

And what we essentially ended up with was an arbitrary selection of 15 names out of a pool of seven bazillion eligible and worthy artists.

This is because any serious effort made towards numerically ranking the true top 15 of these countless qualifiers would have been a stressful waste of time to create, an aggravating waste of time to read and the trigger for lots of heated, obnoxiously directionless debating.

We did make a decent effort to span the “big genres,” but otherwise, this was more or less just a rare chance for each of us to promote two or three of those artists who have garnered more plays on our own iPods than anyone else’s in the room.

How they found their ways under our own individual radars is the interesting part to me. Some were discovered from under a magnifying glass, their names written in size two font at the bottom of music festival lineups. Others were noticed during their sole play on college radio, and it was love at first listen.

What, exactly, is the greatest claim to fame of any of the artists on this list? It could be Burial’s 2008 nomination for Britain’s Mercury Prize, or Deer Tick’s recent network television debut on “The Late Show with David Letterman”, or Ghostland Observatory getting a night slot last year at the Austin City Limits festival.

But sadly, none of these accomplishments can guarantee any artist a profitable future of mass exposure. The fact remains that the music we are badly missing out on is right under our noses more often than not.

So if I had to offer one thing to keep in mind when scanning our list, it would be this: you should not stop here.

Look up all of our recommendations if you truly feel motivated, but you will be just as well off checking out one or two that sound like your thing and using them as jumping off points. Do some blind clicking around their record label roster. See who else they are touring with these days.

Or listen aimlessly and see what you find. Show up to Lollapalooza earlier next year to hear a random band trying to climb their way out of the 1 p.m. slot. Put the iPod in the glove box for a while in exchange for a little daytime WIUX.

Wanna really know the best of what you’ve never heard? Usually, all you need to do is look around a little more.