1. Ten-Twenty-Ten (The Generationals)
2. Caught Up in the Laughter (Bluebrain)
3. CPR/Claws Pt. 2 (Typhoon)
4. Summer Home (Typhoon)
5. Opposite Sides (The Epochs)
6. You Know What I Mean (Cults)
7. Lonely Boy (The Black Keys)
8. Video Games (Lana Del Ray)
9. Tongue Tied (Grouplove)
10. Lost in Time (Whitley)
11. Airplanes (Local Natives)
12. My Body (Young the Giant)
13. Main Street (Deer Tick)
14. Guineafowl (Botanist)
15. Condolences (Kelli Schaeffer)
16. After the Storm (Mumford & Sons)
17. Down in the Valley (The Head and the Heart)
18. I’m on Fire (Chromatics)

What was your favorite song or artist of 2011?

For reference, here is last year’s list.

I love that there isn’t a perfect system for discovering new bands and artists. Instead, there are a plethora of systems that people can use depending on their tastes and preferences. You have the classic word of mouth in addition to iTunes Genius, Pandora, and YouTube, as well as the more recent Spotify.

But you also have these little niche websites that are absolutely fantastic. I’m sure I’m missing some, and I’d love for you to add to this list in the comments. Hopefully one of these will mesh well with your style.

1. mySpoonful: This is my favorite of the bunch. If you like indie rock, go to this site right now and subscribe to their subscription list. Every day you’ll get exactly one e-mail with a link to a new song that’s free to play and free to download if you like it. I love the daily deal aspect because you don’t have to remember to go to the site every day, and it’s only one song, so you can listen to it while you brush your teeth in the morning. One and done. These are bands you’d otherwise never hear of, but many of them are excellent.
2. thesixtyone: This is a beautifully designed website that can keep you transfixed for hours (or just for a few songs). Basically, you go to the site and it picks a song for you to listen to. You can listen to it in the background or you can watch the screen as little tidbits about the artist or band pop up around the screen. If you like the song, you can buy it from the site.
3. 8tracks: Remember back in the days of CDs and cassette tapes when you could make a mix tape and share it with a friend? 8tracks brings that concept to the cloud, and you don’t even have to own the music to share it. You create the mix tapes right there on the site and then share it with friends and the general public. Or you can just listen to “tapes” that have already been created on the site. (Do you remember your first mix tape? Mine was made by my first high-school girlfriend and only contained two songs, but I listened to it over and over: “Romeo and Juliet” by Dire Straits and “All I Want Is You” by U2.)
4. turntable.fm: This is by-invite-only so far, but I love the concept. I’d say that it’s Twitter for music. When you go to the site, you join a “room” of random people listening to music, and you take turns selecting a song for everyone to listen to. There are many other ways to recommend songs to people, but I think the key is that it’s live–everyone is listening to the same music at the same time, so it’s a shared experience (like watching a movie in a theater). Full disclosure: I haven’t tried this site yet, but I love the concept and have heard that it’s all the rage in Silicon Valley.

I'm glad that Deer Tick used this as their album cover instead of an actual deer tick.

Wow. This was either a good year for music, or I was just loose with the ole’ wallet. I bought 286 songs in 2010. I think a big part of it is due to the iTunes Genius widget–it’s eerily good at recommending new songs, and then once I find a new song I like, I listen to more songs from that band, and then I buy several of them. Well done, Steve Jobs. You win again.

Another part of it is that a lot of people have recommended great songs and new artists to me this year. This list isn’t complete, but I know that Kris, Eric, Gabby, Trev, Bob, Matty, Tori, Penelope, Regan, Anna, and Entertainment Weekly have been great at recommending new artists that I like.

Keep in mind that some of this music was released before 2010, but I attained it this year, so it’s going on this year’s playlist. If you notice any trends on this list and have a band to recommend, let me know a few songs of theirs and I’ll check them out.

Here’s the list. The songs I’ve listened to the most are at the beginning of the list, but that is not to discredit the songs at the end, many of which I bought more recently. My artists for the year are Deer Tick, Arcade Fire, and Phoenix.

1. The Wanting Comes in Waves (The Decemberists)
2. Maps (Yeah Yeah Yeahs)
3. Islands (The XX)
4. Congratulations (MGMT)
5. Easy (Deer Tick)
6. Rome (Phoenix)
7. My Number (Tegan and Sarah)
8. The Twist (Frightened Rabbit)
9. Half Light II (No Celebration) (Arcade Fire)
10. Come Downstairs and Say Hello (Guster)
11. Flightless Bird, American Mouth (Iron and Wine)
12. This Dance Is Out of Your Hands (The Steelwells)
13. Ashamed (Deer Tick)
14. We Used to Wait (Arcade Fire)
15. Rainbows in the Dark (Tilly and the Wall)
16. Two Blind Eyes (Fallen Flag)
17. Zebra (Beach House)
18. Ready to Start (Arcade Fire)
19. On My Way Back Home (Band of Horses)
20. Rio (Hey Marseilles)

Also, you’ll be hard pressed to find the Fallen Flag song online. This is from a friend’s band’s demo CD that recently blew me away. It may not even be the best song on the album, but it’s the one that’s gotten in my head the most.

What were your favorite songs of 2010? Here’s last year’s list.

My top 4 are the first four, and the rest are in no particular order. The Heartless Bastards is my band of the year.

1. Song in D (Mock Orange)
2. Velvet (The Big Pink)
3. Fumble (Architecture in Helsinki)
4. Into the Open (Heartless Bastards)
5. I’m Your Boogie Man (KC & The Sunshine Band)
6. Joker and the Thief (Wolfmother)
7. Right Round (Flo Rida)
8. When the Levee Breaks (Led Zeppelin)
9. All My Friends (LCD Soundsystem)
10. I Gotta Feeling (Black Eyed Peas)
11. I Don’t Want to Let You Go (Weezer)
12. Home (Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros)
13. Sweet Disposition (The Temper Trap)
14. Daylight (Matt & Kim)
15. Empty (Ray LaMontagne)
16. Ragged Wood (Fleet Foxes)
17. Gray (Heartless Bastards)
18. Came a Long Way (Heartless Bastards)

What were your favorite songs of 2009? The vast majority of my songs are recommended to me or are from commercials, movies, and TV shows.

If you haven’t heard of Ray, now you have. His is a prodigious talent. His music is soulful with a tinge of folk to it. Pretty much guy-with-a-guitar music (although he does have a band behind him). Reminds me of Van Morrison.

As I did with the Kings of Leon, here are my three favorite songs of Ray’s for you to download. It was really, really hard to narrow these down. Hopefully Nancy will post her top three in the comments section in case you want to explore his music more in depth.

1. “Empty”
2. “Burn”
3. “Trouble”

The coolest thing about attending a Ray concert, I discovered, is that he doesn’t banter. He plays a song, stops, mumbles something (either the name of the next song or “one two three”), then plays the next song. Rinse and repeat for a total of 16 songs.

That’s in stark contrast to most bands, which try to act all buddy-buddy with the current city. Bands in St. Louis usually namedrop to get the crowd riled up, like, “Heyyyyyy St. Louis! How ’bout that arch?” or “Allllllllbert Pujols!” or “Gotta love the free zoo!” or “Toasted ravioli Ted Drewes gooey butter cake Budweiser Jonathan Franzen!”

Yeah, it’s annoying and disingenuous. But Ray keeps it real. We actually just missed him in St. Louis (yes, remind me that I didn’t see him here, but I drove nine hours round trip to see him in another city with “Louis” in the name), but for our readers in Alabama, he’ll be in Birmingham next.