Bleeding ears anyone?

If you haven't noticed yet, I really like to listen to all kinds of music and talk about it until the blood coming out of ears is starting to cover the floor. So just a second ago I was checking spiegel.de to see that one of the coolest bands of the last few years, ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, has released a new album. Thanks Spiegel. So that for itself, is of course good news, unless of course the album is unexpectedly mediocre.
What concerns me is how I learned about this release. I think it's safe to say that the Spiegel is a mainstream publication, even though the do try to cover alternative music more or less, since that part appears in the 'young people' section. And lately I have had a hard time finding new bands that really excite me. It seems that when I was younger, there were too many cool bands to even know them all. Now they appear few and far in between. And since I know better than saying 'Everything was so much better ten years ago' I ask myself what has changed with me. When I was fifteen, I mostly listened to melodic hard core or punkrock, whatever you wanna call it. And I loved that stuff, I also liked crossover and started getting into hip-hop. Wait, crap, ten years ago I was 16 already. Dang, talk about living in the past. Now my taste is much more diverse, I love classic rock, Bob Dylan (yes he has his own category), Raggae, hip-hop, punk rock, jazz, some classical and a whole bunch of other stuff I won't even start putting into categories. But these days I listen to a lot of stuff that is at least 20 years old, some even 50, as far as 'pop' music is concerned. And I constantly find myself annoyed by the stuff that's being put out at the moment. One reason it is like that, I think, is that my taste has evolved. Some of the stuff I used to love, I still like, but I see some of the lesser aspects of it. I might expect too much of a band.
But I wanted to talk about how I learn about new music, even though it's all related. Back then, I pretty much read skateboarding magazines that had some music in it, or my friends learned about stuff on MTV, while we only had three channels. At least I think that's how it was. So on the one hand I blame MTV. Back then, they were covering all kinds of different types of music, they had YO! and Headbanger's Ball and something something Alternative something and so on. Now they have Top 40s and 20s, TRL, Dismissed and Pimp My Ride. I do enjoy Pimp My Ride, but the point is that they don't show nothing out of the ordinary, and neither does VIVA (that's a German music station that is now owned by Viacom, who also owns MTV; don't even get me started on that). You see the same songs over and over, and it seems that to be a rock band, the attitude is most important. I don't wanna say that things were better a few years ago, but I think that the music industry has learned that their bands have to appear as being authetic, which translates into fulfilling stereotypes. So now you have your mean, tattooed rockers, your pimp rappers and so on. Anything that doesn't fit must be a different kind of music, let's not play it. Hence the rise of bands that adapt a retro-sound (The White Stripes for example, even though I do like them).
Bands like Tool, on the other hand, you hardly ever hear about. And neither do you about ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead. Of course I could just go and by me a dang magazine and stay cool forever, but I have learned that you can't trust the magazines. At least my tastes are different. I still have to listen to stuff in the store. But it would give me an idea. I think overall I'm just too lazy to really look.
You know what, nevermind, I just wish I would have known before Spiegel that the album came out, thus underlining my coolness. And I hate the idea of there being a really awesome band that I'm missing out on. With hip-hop I have a powerful ally, but with rock it's really hard to tell. Alright, I might write more when my thoughts are clearer.