Anyone can tell you who's going to be the Next Big Thing. It doesn't happen by fucking accident. Even when it's some cute, piano-playing 12 year old whose voice hasn't cracked yet. Even when they're racking up YouTube views instead of iTunes downloads, Next Big Things are carefully curated and focus-group tested with a rigor that Darwin would have appreciated. Used to be, that process was signed, sealed, and delivered by record companies. Now we all do it while we're bored at work, in wordless partnership - a consensus formed in the cloud, delivered with the authority of thunder, and rained down from a million Twitter and Facebook posts until the presence of a song, of a voice, feels inevitable.

This list is not about Next Big Things.

Quite frankly, we have no idea what it's about. It started three years ago as a dare - go ahead, I bet you can't name a single good band from Wyoming - and then snowballed into the realization that despite the Internet, and in just as many cases because of it, regionalism is still alive. (Hell, did anyone suspect that the nation's next great garage-psych scene would be discovered in Worcester?) You can find doom-folk in Arizona and hot-buttered '70s soul in cold, cold Wisconsin. There's still some great band in Idaho that you haven't heard of because you don't live in Idaho. They may never make it out of Idaho. You won't read about them on Pitchfork or in the Times. But you should hear them.

So for the third year running, we've chosen 51 bands you need to hear now - one from each state, plus one from that noted yet stateless hive of scum and villainy, the District of Columbia. And this year, for the first time, we've partnered with MySpace Music to bring you tunes and videos by all the bands on the list. So once you get done reading this, click on a state to give these bands a listen - and then vote for your favorites. If one of them turns out to be the Next Big Thing - well, it won't be our fault. But it might be yours.