tenkawa_akito wrote:it's hard to find ways to expose yourself to non-mainstream. Unless you know someone who can help expose you to other forms of music, you're SOL. The whole recording industry is geared towards repeating what makes money, which in effect kills creativity.
Knowing someone with eclectic tastes helps a lot, but it's not hard to find new and different music on your own. There's always the internet. I look up stuff on Kazaa sometimes, download a song, if it sucks, then i delete it, read reviews, see what's going on overseas. For example, i always heard about J-rock (japanese rock music), and i wondered what it was like, so i did a search on google, and got a whole bunch of fan sites, and links to bands and all that stuff. I found one band that looked kind of cool, downloaded a couple of their songs, and ending up liking them. I don't know Japanese but the music is cool, and i found some fan sites with translations for their lyrics and they happen to be good songwriters too (weird at that). And then i made a cd to listen in my car.
So it's not that hard. Just most people don't do that sort of thing.