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To follow up those good recommendations, I think buying a record based on the record label can be a safe bet. Though, that's pretty "same", eh?

I think it depends on the label as to whether it could be considered the "same". For a label like Universal, that's a ridiculous thought, simply because they're so huge. On the opposite end of the scale, a small label like Battleaxe Records (to pick a label at random from the Wikipedia list), may be more concentrated on a particular sound where "same" is a great description for their catalogue.

Somewhere in the middle are the mid-sized record labels who are large enough to be able to take a chance on something different, but not so large that they're covering everything from Gregorian Chants to death metal. For example, Impulse Records has a fairly large catelogue of jazz music that, while it's the "same" in terms of the genre it's classed under, I wouldn't really consider it all the same, due to the rapid changes and exploration of jazz that was going on during Impulse's heyday. John Coltrane tried very hard to capture that in the artists and albums that Impulse released.

Of course, this all presumes that one is willing to continue giving money to the RIAA.