If you’re patient, you can find good new music on the web, but it requires lots and lots of patience. I used to go through hundreds of recordings on garageband.com and other now defunct sites where bands uploaded their tracks, and after spending hours listening I’d find a dozen or two gems which I then burned onto CDs to give to friends. That’s how I discovered Drive By Truckers a good several years ago.
I did this again recently on epitonic.com. (I don’t know any other sites like it, although this page which may or may not be up to date lists some: http://www.redferret.net/pmwiki/pmwiki.php) My method, if you can call it that, is to listen to the first 15-30 seconds of the track, sometimes even less, to see if it grabs me and go from there.
There are tons and tons of hard noise rock and whiny singer songwriter stuff out there, but you can find a few original performers.
I have to purchase the music I like online. It’s almost the only place where I can find what I like. The artists that I prefer are not very well known in most circles.