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?
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.
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.
I usually get a bunch of cool stuff from the Quietus end-of-year list. It’s a lot more varied than the lists of most other publications.
Besides that, mostly Rateyourmusic for sure, especially the “Let’s all find the next gem of [current year]” forum threads. I also used to visit /mu/ for recommendations back in the day, but the culture there made me, uhh, reconsider my life choices.
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 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.
last.fm has awesome algorithms.
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.
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 🙌
The YouTube algorithm is sometimes surprisingly good. Like “Listen to this band with 47 plays!” and then it’s a banger.
Bandcamp via the Tags system can really yield some great results. It’s got a virtual feel equivalent to browsing through a physical record store.
I basically just poke around until I find something I like then check the tags at the bottom of a release. Click the tag and then browse that for other stuff.
I’ve been having fun using the location tags. I like to pick a major city far away from me and see what’s popular from there
Oh dude you’d really like radio.garden. Let’s you browse radio stations geographically. Super fun to use
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?
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 and Bandcamp.
yeah, Spotify really thinks you wanna hear the same dozen or songs on a loop. I’d love it if I could “pause” a song and keep it out of rotation for a few weeks. The AI DJ is very occasionally helpful - in between sets of the usual he’ll blast you with something out of left field.
I find it’s more useful to look at artist playlists on spotify - see what they are inspired by. As long as the band’s not too big, then it’s more what their label wants to push.
I also use Bandcamp #discover where you can browse by tags - which seems kinda oldschool now. But so far works great for me
