Ask HN: How do you discover music?

I used to use last.fm quite a bit. I haven't checked in a long time, but there was a great "similar artists" section on each artist page. It made finding new tunes really easy.

Other than that, I try to keep up with what my friends are listening to.

Sadly, I use YouTube Music, payment for which also includes YouTube Premium. I've been wanting to find an alternative, but too many creators I enjoy following are only present on YouTube.

Spotifys algorithm doesn't do anything. YouTube is a tiny bit better. But it's very difficult. You need to click around to get out of the algorithm that shows the same thing for six months.

Exploring the neighborhood around what I like usually works. This means: see what's released on the same music labels. See which journalists and bloggers wrote about the thing i liked. See what artists the original artist considers to be their peers, or inspiration. And reiterate once you find something nice. For random/distant discovery there are radio shows, can seach tracklists on (e.g.) NTS to see which shows play things up my alley. I really don't like the soundcloud UX but for me their recommendation algorithm is quite good, often recommending very obscure but good, and more importantly, relevant things.

I make multiple Spotify playlists, each dedicated to a particular type of music I like (country, electronica, folk, house, etc).

Spotify Discover seems to work pretty well for me.

Yesterday it surfaced an outrun track featuring both guitar and sax solos, which... is pretty on-brand for ethbr0.

Having diverse and varied playlists seems to help? I've had friends complain it doesn't work for them, so I must do something different.

(Doom Flamingo - Domingo's Drive, if anyone's curious https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uH0IUJtUBek )