Have you ever fallen in love with a non-mainstream music band that no one has ever heard of? It feels great to discover some unrecognized talent before everyone is a fan just to be a fan.

Well you can search Uvumi to find bands you would have never heard of from all types of genres. I have grown bored of my music and pretty much everyone else's music around me.

So I went looking for a new way to listen to new non-mainstream music - at least new music to me. Some of these bands that I discovered on Uvumi have been around for quite some time.

On the Uvumi website they describe their mission as follows:

Our mission is to empower artists, promote widespread creation and consumption of art, and add value to the artistic community.

Once you arrive at the Uvumi webpage you will see a menu at the top of your screen that looks like this:

non mainstream music

You can see menu options for charts, users, music, playlists, events and an embedded music player (on the top right). You can play all of the tracks on the site using this embedded player.

There are options for some tracks to be downloaded as MP3 files. These tracks have a floppy disk listed after their name. You can click on the disk to download the track.

The majority of tracks are available for download but some artists only allow you to stream or play the track from the website. In addition you can also log in or create an account to create playlists and what not but it is not required to browse the site or listen to music.

You can click on a band's name and pull up their information and "become a fan".

non mainstream music

Clicking on albums from the band's page will bring you to this group's music. From here you can play one or all of their songs like so:

non mainstream bands

You can check out the charts page to see what the most popular songs among Uvumi's users are right now. You can play or queue up the entire chart. This is a great way to start using this site. You can get a taste of what other users are listening to.

You will be able to see where the song placed last week and an arrow pointing up or down denoting if it climbed or fell. You can see this in the shot below:

non mainstream bands

At the top of the charts around Uvumi it seems that a artist named Pedro Costa is number 1. He is from North Bay Ontario and you can see his music here. You can discover all sorts of new music by clicking around.

By clicking on songs you can search for a specific song or just browse around. You can search by title, artist and genre. You can queue up or play all the songs in your search results. This is a nifty little feature.

non mainstream bands

Now here is an awesome feature - you can play other users playlists so you can sample their tastes. You can choose someone with the same taste in music as yours (genre's chosen) or you can choose something from another culture and see if it floats your boat.

discover new music

Artists can also use the website to help promote their band and get their tracks and albums listed. This is a great way to be heard. If you want to promote yourself you will need to set up an account and follow the instructions. They have this to say about their free promotions and use of your music:

When you join Uvumi as an artist, you grant to us a limited license to promote and distribute your art. You are in control of this license, and you have a right to revoke it at any time. When you remove a song, photo, or other creative work from your profile, we remove it from our servers and we no longer retain a license to promote or distribute that creative content.

This looks like a website created by fans of music. It's great for everyone. Check it out. We have covered other music search engines before here at MakeUseOf like this one that can help you find new artists and there is a community to help you out as well.  Let us know what you prefer in the comments below.