Rock the Rabbit is a mash-up of music and design. Over the past five years, we’ve paired artists like Daft Punk and the Flaming Lips with legendary photographer Mick Rock and today’s top designers. This year we’re turning things up a notch by spotlighting a new cool band every day until our Late Night bash at the South by Southwest music festival in March. Check back often for music, videos, giveaways and artists’ Playboy-inspired T-shirts.

So how does Playboy choose bands for Rock the Rabbit?
The starting point for everything I do at the magazine is to figure out how the Playboy philosophy applies to the project. To an outsider, the way that philosophy works in the context of lifestyle interests such as music may not be immediately intuitive. But here's how it works for me: I always envision our readers listening to music together with women. This is as true for Rock the Rabbit as it is for the choices I make every month on the music page.

Beyond that foundation, I'm looking for an interesting mix. We always want some iconic bands—Iggy Pop and Duran Duran played that role last year—whose aesthetic sensibilities work with ours, and who will pique the curiosity of readers who don't necessarily have a trainspotting interest in new music.

Of course, I'm also committed to exposing readers to the best new sounds and the bands making them. That's the other key ingredient in the mix. After all, this is a unique moment in music history: Technological changes have reduced nearly all the barriers to producing, recording and distributing songs. This radical democratization has obviously opened the gates to a flood of amazing new rock, but it's also created a challenge for bands seeking to find an audience and for fans trying to figure out how to distinguish things they'll dig. We're in the unique situation of being able to facilitate that mutual process of discovery, and Rock the Rabbit (particularly this online portion) is an important way we can serve both our readers (by exposing them to a handpicked group of up-and-coming acts we're into) and the music community (by harnessing the power of our brand to help them reach potential fans).

Timing also plays a role. For the most part, we're hoping to find bands that will be releasing new music in the timeframe of the March music issue. We don't want last year's flash-in-the-pan Internet-hype band, and we don't want to lavish attention on a group our readers won't be able to hear for another six months.

Finally, I hope it goes without saying that choosing the bands for Rock the Rabbit is perhaps first and foremost about fun. Daft Punk, one of last year's RTR artists, is a perfect example of this principle at work. When I saw them play Coney Island in 2007, I was blown away by the way they were innovatively mashing up their own music, by their paradigm-changing stage set, and most of all by the euphoric atmosphere—I just knew we had to work with them. And the same is true of the rest of the Rock the Rabbit bands: If you stumbled upon a venue where any of these acts were playing, you'd want to stay and party. And when it comes to music, that's really what it's all about.

—Tim Mohr, Music Editor