I listen to music 3-6 hours a day and am the type of person who doesn’t enjoy hearing the same song the same day or really the day after. Sites I’ve used for discovering new music were reddit and rateyourmusic.com.
Beyond that I do use Spotify song radios, but typically the song has to be far outside my standard genres to show me new music.
Whatdo others use to discover new music?
Bandcamp daily Blogs Since I listen mostly to hip hop and rappers collaborate often, features is a big part of the way I discover new music
I mainly use metal-archives and bandcamp. On metal-archives, I mainly use the similar artists feature, and sometimes search for specific genres from specific countries.
Edit: Oh, and I totally forgot, everynoise.com is also a great resource to get surface level into new genres.
I totally forgot about metal-archive. Tank you :)
It’s all mostly happenstance and serendipity but I do find a lot of music by googling what I hear in the background of movies and TV. Letterkenny always has really good music and it’s always or almost always by a Canadian group that I might not otherwise encounter.
Spotify’s Discover Weekly used to be great for me for a long time and I’d get lots of new music that I liked. it got pretty stale over the past year or so, with stuff that I don’t enjoy at all, and it often recommends me the same songs that I tell it to not recommend. it feels like I’ve reached the end of the internet and there’s no more music left to try.
Spotify’s discovery algorithm is great. Outside of that I routinely check Pitchfork for new albums. theneedledrop makes good recs too and Any Decent Music is a pretty decent music review aggregator similar to Metacritic but for more niche styles.
These days I listen to a lot of dance music though, so I tend to discover music via DJ mixes on Soundcloud and Bandcamp. Their Bandcamp Weekly section is pretty great and you can easily find music by browsing record labels, people’s collections or the “if you like x” recommendations listed at the bottom of individual release pages.
I’ve discovered more music new to me on Radio Paradise the last few years than anywhere else. They stream up to FLAC quality so an excellent choice for listening on the home stereo. https://radioparadise.com/home
Just checked out Radio Paradise after seeing your comment and loved the last few songs. Thanks for the tip 🙌
Recommendations from friends/random socials/memes. Discovered Wind Rose through a Deep Rock Galactic meme. 😂
I use a combination of Spotify discover weekly playlists, related artist lists, and lately I’ve been finding a random new category that Spotify curates and then searching for playlists of the same type that are curated by users. I think I get more deep cuts that way.
Certainly skews towards specific tastes and genres [indie, punk, diy, and sometimes undergroud hip-hop], but super active and on top of new music and related info
I follow the news portion as well, but for pure new music discovery: https://www.brooklynvegan.com/tags/new-songs/?from=trending
I missed so much good music because I replied on music algorithm recommendatuons, BV has been great for finding the kinds of music I like
Musicmap.com lets you search for an artist, then graphically displays similar artists around them. Great way to find new artists similar to old ones you know you like.
Thanks for this suggestion. Saw it a couple days ago, and ended up making a little command line tool that outputs artists/groups similar to the one you give it using data from that site.
I think you forgot a dash in the url
Yes sorry it is music-map.com
everynoise.com is pretty great, though it hasn’t kept up with the absolute most recent sub genres lately. Still fantastic, though. Connects with Spotify - which I use.
The YouTube algorithm is sometimes surprisingly good. Like “Listen to this band with 47 plays!” and then it’s a banger.
Used to be what.cd
Now it’s just hopes and prayers
I’m not in redacted, but I’ve heard that and Orpheus are the replacements for it, are they any good?
honestly the spotify algorithm is shockingly good at recommending me new music. it knows my taste inside and out. And i listen to almost every genre, but have my specific preferences to every genre. Been on the same account for like 10 years so spotify knows me pretty well by now
Do you have any advice on how to improve your recommendations? I never feel secure in what Spotify recommends me. I don’t know if part of the problem is I use it for my ‘active’ listening and my ‘passive’ background work mixes.
Once upon a time there was this beautiful music player called Songbird that aggegated music blogs and let you directly download MP3s. It was magical.
Now I use Soundcloud, which has been awesome for discovering new music.
Also, don’t sleep on the Internet Archive. There is some awesome music hosted there, often in FLAC.
