Find a community of people that are sorta into the same music. For me it's excellentonline.com (PLUG, it was just a mailing list before I came along and made the website). There's about 300 people there that buy all kinds of weird Indie/Brit/Electronic music and then post about it. I usually read about bands there a couple of months before other magazines like NME (nme.com) pick it up. There's also community ftp sites where people will upload MP3's and since they're all into the same music I can check out a lot of new stuff that I like before buying it (without the hassle of hunting it down on the P2P networks).

later,
ajay