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.
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.
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.
Honestly I listen to the radio, but a radio station that’s alternative and aligns with my musical tastes (www.kink.nl, a Dutch station). Stuff I like I look up, and see what’s similar on Spotify or what have been influences to them.
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.
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
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’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 🙌
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
I find the Tidal algorithm to be excellent. Beyond that I think a good trick is checking out different services. Playing the same artist or song radio on Spotify will be a very different experience to Pandora or YouTube Music or again Tidal. That and a few of them actually have a ‘discovery’, or whatever they call it, setting on the radio that will specifically recommend things that are new and/or unexpected.
last.fm has awesome algorithms.
I’ve found a few decent hits from random music blogs. actually while writing this i went to one of them and now i’m listening to a Japanaese prog rock band that sings in an invented language
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
