It becomes more and more difficult to buy music for us hardcore lovers and collectors unless we’re downloading it from iTunes, Amazon or some other site. Long gone are the days of walking into a record store and flipping through albums or CDs until you find something interesting. It’s even harder to get your hands on local music since there aren’t really many outlets to carry CDs from Macon bands.

Well, the easiest thing to do is to head to shows where local bands are playing and buy a CD directly from the band. I understand, not everyone can make it out to the many events that go on around town. There are commitments to family or work the next day that have to be kept.

So, then what? Well, there are a great many ways to listen to local music online. One of the easiest and most fun is Soundcloud.com. You can log into the site with your Facebook account -- so you don’t have to remember a new password -- and then as you follow artists you like, Soundcloud builds a stream of music from the new releases of the artists you follow.

Some of the Macon artists I follow are singer, songwriters Oh Dorian and Abby Owens, local bluegrass favorites Back City Woods, Macon hip-hop artists Floco Torres and Doski Wo, and experimental collective Macon Noise. These are just a few of the local artists who use Soundcloud to get their music out for people to hear. I even just recently started following The Telegraph’s own Harold Goodridge. He posts audio interviews from the news and his own experiments with sound.

Soundcloud isn’t just limited to local music. Some of your favorite big artists use Soundcloud to release remixes, out-takes and sometimes they release new music to Soundcloud first to get a feeling of how people will respond to their new tunes. Sometimes, you can download these songs for free right there from the page, giving you rarities that can’t be found anywhere else. There are also postings of radio shows from DJs and programs all around the world.

Log into Soundcloud.com and start searching for your favorite Macon artists. Who knows, you may find the next big unknown artist before anyone else.

Contact Roger Riddle at roger.riddle@gmail.com.