I am confident that my appreciation and understanding of music would be no where near what it is today if it was not for the website Epitonic. The site launched in 1999 and I wish I could remember how I stumbled upon it, but it was my musical bible from ’99 to 2002. The site predated many of today’s popular music sites, and was also structured differently. The key to epitonic was related artist discovery somewhat like Pandora today, but with much more underground atheistic. The best utilization of the site, and the way I spent hours and hours, was through searching through the similar artists of your favorite bands or genres. Everyday I found myself downloading (through dial-up) a cd’s worth of new music to listen to.
One of the co-founders of Epitonic was Justin Sinkovich who currently is in the band The Poison Arrows and runs File 13 Records. The site disappeared in 2004, but now Justin is looking to relaunch this influential service. Since Justin lives in Chicago the relaunch party will be here this Fall. However, he first needs to raise some funds to finance the relaunch. You can visit his kickstarter page for more info and to get involved.
In the meantime he has put the site back back online for everyone to browse the archives.