Ask HN: How do you discover new music?

A combination of Pandora, Youtube playlists, Bandcamp (http://bandcamp.com/#discover), Pitchfork (http://pitchfork.com/best/), and /r/listentothis.

Yes, music discovery is still a problem. Take a look at the first iteration of Audio Galaxy, which I thought was the best possible music recommendation platform available. You'd have a client opened. Humans would join groups. Humans would push tracks to groups. This is how I discovered DJ Shadow, DJ Food, and several other artists back in the day (read: 2001) all because I was part of a trip-hop group. People would post discussion threads, organize, etc. There is a difference between computer recommendation services and human recommendation services... you know, soul... and I haven't found a single thing that's similar to that iteration of AudioGalaxy yet. Tomahawk does look promising.

I shudder when I wind up listening to Kaskade because I started an Astral Projection station on Pandora. Last.fm was a bit better, but just not the same as AudioGalaxy of yore. Algorithms don't push barriers and take risk (or at least do either "properly"); it's the exact opposite of what they're trying to do.

I discover new artists mostly through these ways:

* Media: When the name of an artist repeatedly pops up (on tour announcements, on music sites, on social media accounts of artists I follow,...) then I usually go check them out at some point. I also trust some sites with their reviews and listen to well rated records.

* Last.fm: I submit every track I listen to to Last.fm since 10 years (Over 100k "scrobbles" at this point) and therefore their recommendations for me are really good by now.

* Friends telling me to listen to something. With some friends I also exchange a "Best of 20XX" Spotify playlist at the end of the year.

Interestingly enough, I attended a few hundred live shows in my lifetime and it only happened very rarely that I became a fan of an artist I didn't know in advance.

Maybe this is terribly unindy, but I actually really value All Songs Considered on NPR. They have wide coverage, and I usually find a least a track or two each week that exposes me to an excellent new album that I would not have found otherwise.

I also share a Spotify playlist with a friend.

I also feel that algorithm based recommendation services are not going to be better than humans at least for a long time. Algorithms can recommend related stuff well(?) but that's not enough as our tastes keep changing and as you said they don't take risk.

I am thinking of building a radio like service where the playlist is curated by people listening to it. Do you think it's worth building? Any other inputs you'd like to add?