How do you find new music releases? We’ve shown you plenty of tools over the months that make it easier to find some new jams. Between music search engines, streaming sites, music discovery web apps, and services like Muzic you should have unearthed lots of interesting bands and artists by now. Heck, we’ve even shown you how to use iTunes to discover new music.

After you find a bunch of artists you like, however, how do you keep up with all of their new releases? New music albums get released every week, so it’s quite easy to miss a release from one of your favorite artists, even if you’re paying attention. There are plenty of sites out there that house this type of information, but which sites should you be checking out first?

1. Billboard

If you’re looking for all the newest releases, Billboard is the official place to be. Billboard is the center for music information related to popular artists and if your goal is to merely see what’s popular or currently trending you need look no further.

Click on the Charts tab to view the ‘Hot 100′, ‘Billboard 200′, and the top digital and radio songs in the US. They also have news and reviews of the latest albums and song releases, and you can listen to most of the latest tracks.

Find a song or artist you like? With the rest of the sites on the list, you should be set with new music for a while.

2. Music-Alerts

Music-Alerts is a really simple webapp that we covered once in the directory. Essentially, it notifies you when your favorite music artist releases a new CD.

It’s not uncommon for even casual music listeners to have more than 50 artists in their music collections, and keeping track of everything those artists release on a regular basis can be a lot of work.

With Music-Alerts, you can add your favorite artists one by one, name your feed, and click create feed! You will receive a link to your feed that you can add to your favorite RSS reader to get notified of new music releases.

If you’re using Google Reader, I also suggest you check out GRaiN for desktop notifications. Also, be sure to check out Album Reminder, too.

3. New Album Releases

This next site is a personal favorite of mine and something I found a long time ago when looking for new music. New Album Releases, as it’s aptly named, posts new album releases every day.

Categories consist of Rap, Rock, Metal, Pop, Electronic, Folk, Indie, Jazz and Blues, etc. Clicking on an album will take you to a page where you can see album information such as artist, track names, format, and size on disk.

Here’s the kicker: you can download every album you find on this site. I’m not sure how, strictly speaking, legal it is, but each album page includes download links to the individual album. The site does have a DMCA policy listed, which is far more legit than a lot of the other sites I’ve seen.

4. YouTube Music

YouTube, believe it or not, is a great place to find new music releases. It’s not as easy to locate what you’re looking for right away, which is why I have the site lower on my list, but once you’ve discovered some of the new releases you’re interested in from the sites above, you can definitely use YouTube to check them out.

On YouTube’s Music page, you can search via categories like ‘Easy Listening’ or ‘Rap’, or you can view the day’s hits. You can even view events near you, so if one of your favorite artists is coming to town you’ll be able to catch them.

But wait, isn’t YouTube all about videos? Well, yeah, but with over 35 hours of new videos being uploaded to the site every minute, you can definitely use it to find some new music releases.

If you’re familiar with downloading YouTube vids, in fact, you can actually rip the audio right from them to download the latest songs you come across. We’ve covered many services capable of doing this, but all you need is a simple site like FLVTO.

What are some of your favorite sites to keep up on new music releases?

Image Credit: Terry Chan