How to Find New Music • Hacker News Board

Re: How to Find New Music

#171

Post by chiefalchemist » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 4:19 AM UTC

Uhhrrr wrote: post #67

Rather than subjecting oneself to the whims of recommendation engines and random people, I recommend starting with the artists you like: -Find out who they've toured with - this is one of the strongest signals possible -Find out who produced their albums, and check out other albums produced by those folks -See if people in their band(s) have released their own work -Read interviews to find out who their influences ar…

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 Music 6. But about a year ago they shuffled their DJs, as well as the programming. Still better than Spotify, but it's rare I'm wow'ed. Previous to the change it was weekly.

p.s. I work from home. Traditonal radio often feels like a convenient proxy for human contact. Just me?

Re: How to Find New Music

#172

Post by chx » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 4:21 AM UTC

My biggest gripe in this area is I can't search on similar sounding music. This is an an algorithmicaly solvable problem. I mean, Shazam and Google recognizes 'em and that's very old news.

I have heard very long ago Sirenia - Seven Sirens and a Silver Tear. Now, Sirenia is a metal band and this is anything but. It's basically a not too distant relative of the Moonlight Sonata but I didn't realize this until a kind redditor pointed it out after like 10-15 years of searching.

Problem is, you can't search on artists. There's no other track from Sirenia which sounds like this.

Re: How to Find New Music

#173

Post by runarberg » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 4:42 AM UTC

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…

Came here to say the same thing. Human curated music podcasts (such as Bandcamp Weekly) are also a great way to discover music.

Re: How to Find New Music

#174

Post by runarberg » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 4:48 AM UTC

danShumway wrote: post #64

lostgame wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 strongly encourage people to block ads. Ublock Origin is free and extremely simple to use, and it will get rid of all of the pre-roll advertising you see on Youtube. IMO the only reason at this point for anyone of any technical level not to be running an adblocker is if they have some kind of ethical objection to blocking ads in general. And even in that case, I encourage people to leave their adblocker enabled on…

Second the ad blockers. Us humans deserve better then having ads stuffed into our media while we are enjoying it.

Re: How to Find New Music

#175

Post by me551ah » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 5:07 AM UTC

Personally I find the best sources to find new music are last.fm and di.fm. DI.FM is a brilliant collection of radio stations for electronic music and I have discovered many of my favorite bands from DI. Been a subscriber for over a decade now.

Last.fm has much better music recommendations than spotify for some reason. I scrobble all of my tracks on last.fm and checkout their recommendations weekly. A lot of my now favourite artists came from here. Last.fm also supports playing radio/recommendations on spotify or youtube.

Re: How to Find New Music

#176

Post by prawn » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 5:12 AM UTC

unsignedint wrote: post #165

I mainly use Spotify recommendations. As a someone with highly niche musical preference (Mostly anime and some game music) Spotify seems to give me most spot-on recommendations. Those recommendations tend to be within what I consider as anime/game genre. YouTube Music tends to provide me recommendation that's a little too broad for my taste; I see recommendation often cover J-Pop songs. Might be something to do with…

Same.

I'm always surprised when people consider Spotify's recommendations poor. I've found them to be excellent and have added hundreds of tracks into my lists that have come purely from things like Artist Radio. I've had times listening to Discover Weekly where I've hearted track after track. I listen to a range of things but most-played artists would be RJD2, Bonobo, Chemical Brothers, etc. Maybe that style just translates well to Spotify's audience or algorithms?

Re: How to Find New Music

#177

Post by audiometry » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 5:17 AM UTC

pmoriarty wrote: post #58

lostgame wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 just use youtube-dl[1] and never see a single ad. Also, downloading videos with youtube-dl lets me archive them for myself, which is useful insurance against when (as all too often happens) the video gets pulled from youtube for some reason. As for quality, this thread is about discovery, where quality shouldn't really matter. But if quality matters a lot to you, after you discover some music that you like, you can…

I save music I like to a playlist in YouTube, then have YouTube-dl set up with a configuration script to download the audio from everything in those playlists to a Dropbox directory. Then I can listen to it via the Dropbox app audio player (kind of a piece of shit) on my iPhone. There is a small python script to tidy some of the file naming too. But it all boils down to running a .bat file now and then.

Re: How to Find New Music

#178

Post by bryanmgreen » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 5:41 AM UTC

Spotify Discovery is pretty good for me - but I think its because I listen to so much diverse music to begin with.

Then I listen on Amazon HD because the sound quality is so much better (I have a good sound system, not just crappy bluetooth earbuds).

KCRW is arguably also Los Angeles's best single product. Miss Jason Bentley though.

Re: How to Find New Music

#179

Post by timc3 » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 5:58 AM UTC

troyvit wrote: post #33

soylentcola wrote: post #29

Other than the stuff already mentioned (subreddits, blogs, playlists, word of mouth) I discover a ton of music via human-programmed streaming "radio". I know it's not as big a thing as it was in the mid-late 2000's but there are still thousands of Shoutcast/Icecast/etc. stations and many of them are programmed by DJs, music enthusiasts, and fans. A good set of bookmarks is like having a radio dial filled with 10 or 2…

Same here, in fact at least 90% of my new music comes from online radio. 90% of that comes from dandelionradio.com. What other streaming radio stations would you recommend?

NTS radio

Re: How to Find New Music

#180

Post by raleighm » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 5:58 AM UTC

Value of algorithmic music recommendations depends. The Discover Weekly tracks? Rarely are they great. But if I create a new playlist from a particular track I love (i.e., only one track in the playlist), and I look at the recommended tracks to add to the playlist, I often find gems. Maybe one in ten tracks will be great. Some might moan "only one in ten?" But to me that's amazing.