Independents’ Week is the perfect time to pay tribute to all of the places that we take inspiration from; all of the places we scour for new music. We get hundreds of tracks uploaded to amazingtunes.com every day (and we listen to them all) but we regularly go looking for new music too. We thought it only fair to highlight those places where we consistently find mind-blowingly great stuff.

—

Brighton’s The Recommender is one of our most trusted resources for new music. There are many reasons but above all, everytime we go to research a band, we stumble across a post about them on The Recommender. Every time.

Secondly, they understand the importance of community within independent music writers. With regular interview features with other bloggers, organising meet-ups and currently running a blog poll, there are few others going to such lengths to highlight and grow independent music writing.

One of the lengthier blogs, giving in-depth coverage to the bands and not always jumping on the ‘buzz band’-wagon, The Recommender is eloquent and the artists always impress.

Mike Bradford’s (founder) Independent Inspiration:

I always put my passion for new music down to the man who brought me up from aged four years old, Keith Barnes. He’s my step father and he owned an independent music shop in Oxford, so I was treated to the best in cutting edge music all my life. A definite reason behind my interest in music discovery.

The Recommender actually started out years ago as me simply giving out CDs to friends and family every month, called ‘Recommended June’, …July …August etc, to show off the great new music I’d tapped into. Then it went onto the blog section on Myspace about five/six years ago, eventually turning it into the WordPress blog you see today in March 2008. It was a natural evolution.

Website: The Recommender

Twitter: @therecommender