To have a taste of the Cuban salsa music, try it with the selection of online players below. You can also open this page into a new tab to listen while you browse. (Warning: it may take a little while for the music players to get initialized.)

The bottom of this page has links about where to buy Cuban salsa music, and a list of prominent artists to start with if you want to build your own Cuban salsa collection.

• DJ Rich's music selection at ReverbNation:
  
  
  
  Some more samples and music news available on Rich's La Clave Cubana website.

  
  

• Other UK DJs at ReverbNation:
  
  • DJ Javier La Rosa
  • DJ Flecha: ReverbNation, SoundCloud (brilliant mixes in there).

  
  

• Planet Timba at ReverbNation:
  
  
  
  Some more samples and music news available on the Planet Timba blog.

  
  

• DJ Melao at ReverbNation:
  
  
  
  Some more samples and music news available from www.timbastars.com, a page maintained by DJ Melao.

  
  

• Timba Por Siempre at ReverbNation:
  
  
  
  Some more samples, music news (in Spanish) and Youtube videos available on the Timba Por Siempre blog.

  
  

• Boogaloo Music at ReverbNation:
  
  
  Some more samples and music news available (in Polish) on the Boogaloo Music blog.

  
  

• DJ Titouf (La Timba Soy Yo) at ReverbNation:
  
  
  Some more samples and music news available (in French) on the DJ Titouf blog.

  
  

• Other ReverbNation pages:
  
  • HabanAudio
  • Pura Timba - BLOG

  
  

• Last FM offers an interesting system to make connections between artists. Type the name of your favourite salsa artists and the system opens an online radio which will play a random selection of similar artists. Los Van Van, Maikel Blanco, Manolito y su Trabuco, Bamboleo etc. are good starting points for Cuban salsa and timba.

  
  

• DJ Salsa King, alias Henry Vina, maintains an internet radio and plays a fair amount of Cuban salsa amongst a diverse selection of salsa music styles.

  
  

• Yemaya's Verse, the blog of Gabriel Wilder, offers a selection of Youtube videos of live events and recent releases.

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Where to buy your Cuban salsa music:

• Descarga.com is the absolute reference for all styles of salsa. You can find every CD there, even rare ones, the only problem is the postage costs.
• Surprisingly, iTunes has quite a wide selection of prominent Cuban salsa artists. New releases usually take a lot of time to appear though. Encoding is AAC 256kbps, good to play on any good hifi sound system.
• Cubamusic.com offers a weird selection of MP3s which includes rare albums and new releases as well as obscure ones. Worth a try if you can't find what you are looking for anywhere else. Encoding quality is good: MP3 256kbps, equivalent to iTunes.
• LatinPulseMusic.com offers a very extensive selection, but the encoding is MP3 VBR with the "standard" preset of the LAME encoder. We haven't really tried on a party sound-system, so make your own mind. Personally we prefer to stick to 256kbps fixed rate, but that might be only subjective.
• Prodland.de has a good catalogue, but there have been many reports of money being cashed and CDs being sent 6 months later, wrong CDs being sent, emails never answered etc. They might have solved their organisational problems by now, but use at your own risk.

Please email us or add comments below if you know of any other good outlet for Cuban salsa music. Many thanks in advance!

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List of prominent Cuban salsa artists:

To build your own music collection, the following artists (in no particular order) are a good starting point. Not all of them maintain web pages, but lots of info can be found on other sites via Google, and many music videos of their hit songs can be found on Youtube. Lots of these artists maintain facebook fan pages (not linked here). You will very often see modern Cuban salsa referred to as "timba", the actual term to designate that particular musical genre ("casino" being the corresponding dancing style).

Timba:

• Los Van Van - Wikipedia - GOOGLE
• Maikel Blanco - Timba.com - GOOGLE
• Manolito Simonet (Manolito y su Trabuco) - Wikipedia - GOOGLE
• La Charanga Habanera - GOOGLE
• Adalberto Álvarez - Wikipedia - GOOGLE
• Pupy y los que son Son - Wikipedia - GOOGLE
• Elio Revé y su Charangón - GOOGLE
• Issac Delgado - Wikipedia - GOOGLE
• Havana d'Primera - GOOGLE
• Giraldo Piloto and Kilmax - GOOGLE
• Bamboleo - GOOGLE
• Miguel Enriquez - GOOGLE
• Calle Real - Wikipedia - GOOGLE

Reggaetón / Cubatón:

• Gente de Zona - Wikipedia - GOOGLE
• Eddy K. - Wikipedia - GOOGLE
• Los Salvajes - GOOGLE

More info and tour dates can be found on the excellent Timba.com website. The tour dates page is actually a good resource to get a list of artist names.
Wikipedia has a large page about timba, the specific name for modern Cuban salsa music, with lots of artist names.

For Cuban Reggaetón / Cubatón, Cubaton.com has a relevant list of artists and lots of samples, as well as its alias Atena Music.

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Enjoy!

-- DJ Sacha