Pandora tops my list as the site for new music. It's an internet radio service, but before you role your eyes (I know there's been a lot of bad internet radio), it's backed by The Music Genome Project which has already analyzed a massive selection of popular and indie music. Each song in the MGP is analyzed for over 400 musical attributes. Pandora takes this information and uses it to make suggestions for new music you may enjoy. You simply tell them a song or artist you enjoy listening to and they do the rest. Rating songs thumbs up or thumbs down allows Pandora to further understand your taste in music. Two great things about this service: 1. They explain why they choose any song for you to listen to which can equip you with an incentive as to why you like the music you like. 2. Clicking on any song title, album title, or artist name brings you to a page in the MGP where a vat of knowledge awaits your wallowing.

Liveplasma - Originally, Live Plasma was Music Plasma. Now they've added movies or something to it. I'm not sure; I only use it for its music suggestions. The scope of the music spectrum Live Plasma covers is considerably more limited than Pandora's - sticking to top 40 and indie bands with a larger niche, but it's still useful. Live Plasma generates a map of similar artists around one artist you submit. The suggestions span several genres and the more similarities between two artists, the closer they are in the map. Every artist name is clickable with limited information. The larger the orb, the more influence in popular music they hold.

Cnet's Mp3 - In its heyday (turn of the century), was the ultimate new music site. Artists submitted mp3s to the site and selected what restrictions would be placed on individual files. There was no restriction to the library size each artist held and some artists had their entire collection available for download. It covered many genres and nearly every sub-genre of the time. There were charts for every genre and sub-genre. That Mp3.com no longer exists after Cnet bought the site in 2004. Now mp3.com stores a mediocre collection of mp3s (most of which must be streamed at low quality).

Allmusic Containing a wealth knowledge on many artists, All Music first functions as a reference to answer questions like... Who performed this song? or How many albums does this artist have? But the similar artist section on the main artist page is a great resource to finding good and very similar artists.

Musicovery created by those who created Music Plasma, and is an interesting combination of the Music Plasma map system and internet radio. Listeners click their mood somewhere on a grid to have a map of music created for them. The map is fully navigable and features a limited form of pick and play.

Epitonic is not the best at updating and probably not winning an award for navigability, Epitonic does store a limited selection of independent artists and very few genres. Most of the artists on the site are worth looking at and you could learn a little something about some lesser known genres. It's kind of in an old Mp3.com format. Kind of.

Indie torrent - I really shouldn't even include this site in this list since its invite only, but I had a membership once. Everything on the site is bit torrent and it's heavily policed. It's a rather elitist club, but if you get an invite, check it out, then send me one. It's all user submitted, and whatever trend is running through the site is usually what you'll find, but the site is (poorly) search-able.