Why was this comment killed? I vouched for it to revive it.
How to Find New Music
11–20 of 268 posts
Re: How to Find New Music
#12OP: have you ever tried Spotify's weekly Discover playlist? I can't believe how good it's been for me, and I never took to Pandora or similar recommendation methods. Discover has opened me up to bands that were always on the perimeter of my tastes but that I never took the plunge to listen to, and I'm amazed at how Spotify even knows to recommend a deep cut that I'll love from an artist I typically hate. Spotify has 9 or 10 years of Premium listening data from me at this point, and for me they are using it well.
Re: How to Find New Music
#13I really like Bandcamp's articles. They're hyping material on their own platform of course, but you can give it a quick listen on-the-spot, and if you like it, that's a win for you, the artist, and Bandcamp. If you don't like it, you can move on to the next article straightaway. Moreover it's often stuff that no algorithm would have recommended to you.
Re: How to Find New Music
#14I'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, similarly, have fantastic recommendation engines.
Next to radio, YouTube is certainly the poorest quality experience for listening to music in the current era of options.
I keep a family plan for both Apple Music and Spotify to literally just share with my best friends so they won't default to listening to music on YouTube while we're hanging out.
I've collected CD's and vinyl for 15 years, and spent very little time listening to radio - the jarring advertising, especially between tracks on an album, drives me mad as a musician, listener, and producer.
Re: How to Find New Music
#15FM Radio
Eww. Unless you can find yourself an independent station that actually plays something outside of the top-pops, please, please, count me out. In every Uber and/or cab I end up taking, I ask them to turn the FM radio off. The jazz and classical stations are okay, but then the commercials completely ruin the listening experience - especially for 'chill out' genres like the above. Word of mouth from friends - Spotify or…
For French speakers, France Inter has a great playlist without ads when they are on strike. When it's not the strike season or if you have more precise tastes, FIP is nice too.
Re: How to Find New Music
#16When I was growing up, MySpace was one of my favourite sources. Sadly, they lost their entire collection in a botched server migration. In April 2019, the MySpace Dragon Hoard was uploaded to the Internet Archive.
I gathered all the metadata, added all the songs to an iTunes 10.6.3 library, and made smart playlists based on genre, location and (assumed) language.
That's helping me find unknown bands from far away, who I would never have heard of otherwise.
Personally I'm into rock (all kinds: punk, metal, Christian), though the Dragon Hoard also has pop, rap, dance, etc. Listening through everything is taking a very long time, and most of the music honestly sucks. But when I do find something good (e.g. The Dolls, Ritalinn) then it's very indie, and good for learning a new language!
Message me if you'd like more details, and/or have a good idea how to share the content safely.
Another project I'd love to see is to group bands based on friends' Likes, which I've scraped from Facebook. There must be a way to visualise clusters of bands who many of the same friends all like, though I'm not sure how best to do that.
Re: How to Find New Music
#17Word of mouth from friends is number one. As a DJ, I used to live by this. I wouldn't go hunting on BeatPort, I'd just find what friends were listening to and try to explore from there. 90% of the time it went awesome. Other than that - Spotify and Apple Music both, at this time, have excellent playlists and recommendations - as far as I've found, in my extensive use of both platforms. I prefer Apple Music, for no pa…
Spotify's (non-algorithmic) New Music Friday, (algorithmic) Release Radar and Discover Weekly playlists have all been amazing for finding music for me.
Re: How to Find New Music
#18OP: have you ever tried Spotify's weekly Discover playlist? I can't believe how good it's been for me, and I never took to Pandora or similar recommendation methods. Discover has opened me up to bands that were always on the perimeter of my tastes but that I never took the plunge to listen to, and I'm amazed at how Spotify even knows to recommend a deep cut that I'll love from an artist I typically hate. Spotify has…
I have had exactly the opposite experience. I have been pigeonholed for the past 2 years and counting. The structure of my playlists lately have been 25 songs that I've already heard a thousand times in previous Discover Weeklys or Daily Mixes, then 3 songs I haven't heard in a while from artists I know, then 2 actually interesting tracks. The heyday of Discover Weekly for me was 2016.
I've heard that they rely much more on which artists you "follow" rather than your listening behavior and saved songs. But I have no idea if this is true. I'm having trouble explaining it and subsequently have lost faith in the platform.
Re: How to Find New Music
#19I like http://everynoise.com. Start with a genre or artist you know, and branch out.
Re: How to Find New Music
#20I'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,…
I pay $10 a month for Youtube Premium, which gives me ad free youtube, access to Google Play Music and the Youtube Music app.