I listen to music 3-6 hours a day and am the type of person who doesn’t enjoy hearing the same song the same day or really the day after. Sites I’ve used for discovering new music were reddit and rateyourmusic.com.
Beyond that I do use Spotify song radios, but typically the song has to be far outside my standard genres to show me new music.
Whatdo others use to discover new music?
I mainly use metal-archives and bandcamp
I totally forgot about metal-archive. Tank you :)
Bandcamp daily Blogs Since I listen mostly to hip hop and rappers collaborate often, features is a big part of the way I discover new music
Spotify’s Discover Weekly used to be great for me for a long time and I’d get lots of new music that I liked. it got pretty stale over the past year or so, with stuff that I don’t enjoy at all, and it often recommends me the same songs that I tell it to not recommend. it feels like I’ve reached the end of the internet and there’s no more music left to try.
The YouTube algorithm is sometimes surprisingly good. Like “Listen to this band with 47 plays!” and then it’s a banger.
Certainly skews towards specific tastes and genres [indie, punk, diy, and sometimes undergroud hip-hop], but super active and on top of new music and related info
I follow the news portion as well, but for pure new music discovery: https://www.brooklynvegan.com/tags/new-songs/?from=trending
I missed so much good music because I replied on music algorithm recommendatuons, BV has been great for finding the kinds of music I like
honestly the spotify algorithm is shockingly good at recommending me new music. it knows my taste inside and out. And i listen to almost every genre, but have my specific preferences to every genre. Been on the same account for like 10 years so spotify knows me pretty well by now
Do you have any advice on how to improve your recommendations? I never feel secure in what Spotify recommends me. I don’t know if part of the problem is I use it for my ‘active’ listening and my ‘passive’ background work mixes.
It’s all mostly happenstance and serendipity but I do find a lot of music by googling what I hear in the background of movies and TV. Letterkenny always has really good music and it’s always or almost always by a Canadian group that I might not otherwise encounter.
I’ve discovered more music new to me on Radio Paradise the last few years than anywhere else. They stream up to FLAC quality so an excellent choice for listening on the home stereo. https://radioparadise.com/home
Just checked out Radio Paradise after seeing your comment and loved the last few songs. Thanks for the tip 🙌
everynoise.com is pretty great, though it hasn’t kept up with the absolute most recent sub genres lately. Still fantastic, though. Connects with Spotify - which I use.
yeah, Spotify really thinks you wanna hear the same dozen or songs on a loop. I’d love it if I could “pause” a song and keep it out of rotation for a few weeks. The AI DJ is very occasionally helpful - in between sets of the usual he’ll blast you with something out of left field.
I find it’s more useful to look at artist playlists on spotify - see what they are inspired by. As long as the band’s not too big, then it’s more what their label wants to push.
I also use Bandcamp #discover where you can browse by tags - which seems kinda oldschool now. But so far works great for me
To add to your sites:
- Last.fm, especially the “Similar Albums” section on Album pages and the “Similar to” section on Artist pages.
- Sharethreads on 4chan’s /mu/: The download links in older threads might be dead, but it still might be useful for discovering new music.
- “Essential [insert genre] Charts”
I am often getting interesting stuff from the personal discover playlists on Spotify. Often it is very obscure vands with like a thousand listeners on last.fm, so I feel like I am being exposed new and upcoming bands and not just established names.
Honestly I listen to the radio, but a radio station that’s alternative and aligns with my musical tastes (www.kink.nl, a Dutch station). Stuff I like I look up, and see what’s similar on Spotify or what have been influences to them.
Spotify’s discovery algorithm is great. Outside of that I routinely check Pitchfork for new albums. theneedledrop makes good recs too and Any Decent Music is a pretty decent music review aggregator similar to Metacritic but for more niche styles.
These days I listen to a lot of dance music though, so I tend to discover music via DJ mixes on Soundcloud and Bandcamp. Their Bandcamp Weekly section is pretty great and you can easily find music by browsing record labels, people’s collections or the “if you like x” recommendations listed at the bottom of individual release pages.
There’s some pretty good YouTube channels geared for that, you just have to find the ones with the vibes you like. And once you’re into one those channels, youtube gets very good at recommending more of those channels.
I really like Music for empty rooms they have a lot of all kind of ambient music, jazz, niche psychedelic rock, old disco/soul, really hard to find japanese music, international older instrumental stuff 60s-80s. Overall more niche I guess, I love them, give a try, they update everyday, sometimes a full album. And The art of listening they post less often, but it’s always full albums and they have much more recent stuff, and they have a very diverse repertoire of styles outside of the most popular rock-pop. From all around the world.
