How to Find New Music • Hacker News Board

Re: How to Find New Music

#251

Post by clSTophEjUdRanu » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 7:41 PM UTC

rchaud wrote: post #239

clSTophEjUdRanu wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't get me out of my bubble. I'm a huge fan of cheesy synthwave and would have never known had Trevor Something - Death Dream not been a freeleech pick on w.cd years ago. Curation + association is the key.

I'm a big Trevor Something fan as well (love that he releases an LP or EP annually), but surely you'd have noticed his material on NewRetroWave, the biggest synthwave Youtube channel. They love TS as well, and make sure to upload his new stuff with a custom video.

Before that freeleech pick I had no idea any of that universe existed. I had no idea this genre even existed. Now I do.

Re: How to Find New Music

#252

Post by Paianni » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 7:45 PM UTC

lostgame wrote: post #14

pmoriarty wrote: post #7

I'm surprised this article doesn't mention youtube, which is a major way of finding new music for me. Not only can I find new music through videos that youtube selects as related to ones I like, but listening to playlists that contain music that I like is another great way to find new music, and so is listening through the other music posted by people who post music that I like. And then, of course, one always has th…

But YouTube's quality is such hot garbage, and the ads, oh, God, the ads. Nothing ruins the experience of a perfectly good album like Miles Davis' 'Kind of Blue' more than a jump from cool jazz to an ad for Grammarly that's a full 5-10db louder than what I was listening to. If YouTube's audio quality was worth listening to, YouTube Premium might be a thing, but Spotify and Apple Music have it down to a science, and,…

YouTube's 160k Opus is actually pretty good.

Re: How to Find New Music

#253

Post by bufo » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 8:21 PM UTC

I've been enjoying https://albumoftheyear.org (a critic and user review aggregator) to find new music. It has some blind spots, for which @tedgioia (http://tedgioia.com/bestalbumsof2019.html) can help.

Re: How to Find New Music

#254

Post by chiefalchemist » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 8:30 PM UTC

rchaud wrote: post #244

chiefalchemist wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All good points. But why doesn't Spotify, Apple, etc. either make this node options available to traverse the library? Or at least incorporate it into their algorithms to improve suggestions? I find Spotify's suggestions closer to "Here's things we're confident you won't hate." Which makes sense if "engagement" is their measurement. But by my measurement, it's yawn-city. Beige. My best source used to be BBC Radio Mus…

I'd say it's because Spotify and others don't have an incentive to let users dig that deep. They want to keep things simple, whereas sites like Discogs and Rateyourmusic are designed to let you go deep into the details. Streaming networks need users to be able to see something they can hit Play on, not have the user click on a producer's name and see no information and no tracks.

It's a graph database. Nothing esoteric by any means. I shouldn't have to know Jagger & Richards are The Glimmer Twins, or Richard D. James is the Aphex Twin.

If Streaming Service X's value add is beige recommendations - and the music industry is content with such "product placement", then they both deserve to suffer. If only that pain was 10% of my boredom.

Re: How to Find New Music

#255

Post by lowbloodsugar » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 9:09 PM UTC

Get Roon. Get Tidal (or spotify or whatever). Get a cheap tablet like a Fire. Throw a party, invite people to brunch, coffee. Pass the tablet around so people can pick music they like. Did this all last summer and expanded my collection massively. For example, somehow I had forgotten of the existence of Massive Attack, while I was playing something else (Vangelis perhaps) my brother took the tablet, found and played Teardrop. Haven't stopped listening to it since.

Re: How to Find New Music

#256

Post by sheinsheish » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 9:48 PM UTC

https://archive.org/details/netlabels Nobody mentions this one. It's a shame really because there's lot of tracks here. I guess Spotify etc. has beaten the scene.

Re: How to Find New Music

#257

Post by sheinsheish » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 9:56 PM UTC

mutagen wrote: post #74

fetus8 wrote: post #28

Anyone remember back on what.cd the related artists "web" system? That was my favorite way to find music, and since the site's demise, I have yet to find a comparable way of discovering similar artists. Luckily back then, I started following many of my favorite artists and labels on social media, which sort of created a new wave of recommendations based on what those artists are talking about. It works, but it's not…

Every Noise At Once [1] has a nice web of genres and artists to check out. From their description: Every Noise at Once is an ongoing attempt at an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 3,883 genre-shaped distinctions by Spotify as of 2020-01-30. The calibration is fuzzy, but in general down is more organic, up is more mechanical…

the best !

Re: How to Find New Music

#258

Post by marstall » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 10:27 PM UTC

gfxgirl wrote: post #198

aloukissas wrote: post #147

By far, the best way I've discovered new music is through radio. Find a station with producers that you jive with and this will be a treasure chest. I was lucky enough to grow up in Athens (GR), where radio is really, really good. A big disappointment happened when I moved to SF (which, aside of KCSM - a great jazz radio - is a music radio disappointment). I was lucky to come across KCRW from LA, perhaps the best rad…

No radio stations have ever played the music I'm looking for so no, this doesn't work for me at all. The majority of stations play top 40, or top R&B/Urban (no idea what the PC description is), top country, class rock. Maybe if you live in LA or NYC there are some other stations with more eclectic selections like say KCRW in LA but I have no interest in what they play.

stream them!

Re: How to Find New Music

#259

Post by xb12x » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 11:24 PM UTC

Not everyone's choice in music can be heard 48 consecutive times in 20 time periods on the radio, or on the radio at all, so ya gotta go look for it. Hard target searches, rabbit holes on Google etc...for me, I love heeeavy music, black metal, deathcore, slamming death metal are my go to favorite genres. Radio doesn't play that type stuff so, I've found myself literally picking a band out of the air, do a Google search on them, find their albums, pick a few songs, listen to them on youtube if I like them enough chances are I'll buy the album.

Sure I've wasted cash on what I thought was a solid album from a new band I just found but it's the name of the game imo. Music is incredibly important to me so losing a few bucks on a shit album isn't that bad, I mean it sucks ass but it is what it is. I've found bands that I absolutely fell in love with and have been a huge fan since the day I found them, it's a risk I'm willing to take. Its paid off waayyy more times then not.

Re: How to Find New Music

#260

Post by notatoad » Sat, Feb 01, 2020, 1:41 AM UTC

rorykoehler wrote: post #185

notatoad wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

which is a great way to discover new and different music - the sort of thing the algorithms won't recommend to you.

Algos have been much better to me tbh.

the discovery algorithms are pretty awesome in general, but they're really easy. nobody's wondering how to find the sort of recommendations that spotify gives you, because everybody gets plenty of algorithmic recs every day.

but sometimes it's nice to get something that goes a bit weirder than what the algos typically give you.