That's a largely theoretical advantage for radio.

What happens far more often is that the big labels that are paying (directly or indirectly) get to decide what gets played. And listeners are forced to choose between a handful of intentionally-overlapping stations, each of which is pushing, primarily, an unfortunately small number of "hits".

While bittorrent itself is not a medium that lends itself to discovery, it does at least serve any non-trivial subset of taste and isn't as easily gamed as radio play and shelf space.

Managers pay quite a bit to get "unknown artists" airtime on radio stations.

Smaller bands advertising via internet route still have YouTube, Soundcloud, etc. I've bought a few albums as a result.

Also, with the proliferation of smartphones, a significant group choose to listen off their own devices rather than slog through yet another pop song + advertising.

If you belong to a good private (or maybe a public one, too) torrent community, you'll likely end up finding more artists than the radio would help you find.

Just looking at new uploads, looking at top lists, browsing by tags, and going through by genre yields new finds. It's easy to listen to new/unfamiliar artists risk free, and most passionate music lovers do find a way of getting money back to the artists. At least in my own experience this is the case. I'm sure there are people who are 100% freeloaders, but I wonder if they'd have bought anything ever anyway.

That's true for bittorrent, although as others have suggested, smaller torrent communities focused on a particular genre may also act to provide ad-hoc recommendations.

At Presto.fm we're working on a different solution to the problem, by creating a way to discover and stream new music using personalized radio stations seeded with the listener's existing favourite artists or genres. (A bit like some existing services but with a focus on niche artists and a deep catalogue of music).

http://presto.fm

I would much rather see a legal way (with permission from the artist) like Pandora.

Ensuring that artists receive both exposure and fair compensation is important to us.

Presto.fm currently uses music content from YouTube, which is licensed under Google's agreements with the major labels and the NMPA, so that artists can receive royalties from the ads included in player.

Many independent artists also upload their own music for free, just as they do with Soundcloud, etc, as they recognise it as a great way to reach new audiences.

The Pirate Bay have been promoting unknown content on their front page as have other file sharing sites. There's music blogs and youtube channels that promote unknown artists.

Not to mention file sharing technologies such as direct connect and soulseek that lets you browse everything a user shares which is another way of discovering new content. You can search for something that you like and hopefully discover people with similar taste and find new stuff in their collections.

Some more or less private trackers do actually promote artists explicitly (featuring select submissions). And even when they don't, people still easily discover new less known bands from searching by genre and reading torrent discussions—I'd say it works even better than radio. Although this depends on the community and submission guidelines of a particular tracker.

Radio is still no good for 'real' discovery. If you're really into music discovery, give Audiogalaxy a shot. Here's something to start with: http://www.audiogalaxy.com/mix/11997-The%20Coding%20Zone/

"Sorry, Mixes are not available in your country"

Never had that problem with torrents...