Not necessarily - a lot of musicians listen to stuff which is not obviously similar. Examples I've seen: Billy Gibbons -> Depeche Mode, Robert Plant -> Patty Griffin, Bono -> Frank Sinatra, Lars Ulrich -> Lou Reed -> Laurie Anderson, Frank Zappa -> L Shankar -> Stefan Grappelli.
But yes, if you really want unexpected paths, you have to just keep your ear to the ground. The way I discovered I liked Goa music was that I randomly clicked on it while surfing Shoutcast 15 years ago.
EDIT: (of course the disadvantage is that you have to sort through a lot of chaff)
I'm a big Trevor Something fan as well (love that he releases an LP or EP annually), but surely you'd have noticed his material on NewRetroWave, the biggest synthwave Youtube channel.
They love TS as well, and make sure to upload his new stuff with a custom video.
w.cd had the best recommendation system for music and audio equipment. The communities that tried to take it's place after don't come close.
It's a shame because I don't know where to talk about it anymore. r doesn't come close, at least not yet. The community music collages on w.cd were unreal.
yeah, we really lost a huge resource when w got shut down. I had mostly stopped pirating music by then, but still visited the site daily just to find new recommendations. r seems like a good place to acquire music, but has completely failed to recapture that community aspect.
Producers are a huge piece of the puzzle to unlock. They tend to stick in similar areas of music, so odds are, you will like the other stuff they work on. Great point.
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?
I'd say it's because Spotify and others don't have an incentive to let users dig that deep. They want to keep things simple, whereas sites like Discogs and Rateyourmusic are designed to let you go deep into the details.
Streaming networks need users to be able to see something they can hit Play on, not have the user click on a producer's name and see no information and no tracks.
It's a graph database. Nothing esoteric by any means. I shouldn't have to know Jagger & Richards are The Glimmer Twins, or Richard D. James is the Aphex Twin.
If Streaming Service X's value add is beige recommendations - and the music industry is content with such "product placement", then they both deserve to suffer. If only that pain was 10% of my boredom.
I used to be quite happy with Spotify suggestions, but these have become much worse lately. Mostly remixes of what I already listened to. And the new app ux feels more unintuitive, adds friction (way more clicks). I am at the point where I start looking for alternative music players.
True there was a song from a band I used to listen to and I realized it had a name from someone not in the band and found out they were in another band too. It was slightly different style but interesting and enjoyable. So it pays to look further into artists and people involved.
That is maybe a good idea! If I were going to do it, I'd start by crawling AllMusic and select portions of Wikipedia. But it's easy enough to do it manually for the use case, "I've run out of stuff to listen to by X, how do I get more?"
I'd like at least some graph database containing all these entities. Can probably be scraped from the internet, would need to know which ones are highest quality and most comprehensive though.
the discovery algorithms are pretty awesome in general, but they're really easy. nobody's wondering how to find the sort of recommendations that spotify gives you, because everybody gets plenty of algorithmic recs every day.
but sometimes it's nice to get something that goes a bit weirder than what the algos typically give you.
It works for literature reasonably well. Start with somebody you really like, and see who they wrote critiques and reviews for, who they wrote letters to most frequently, and who they admired or otherwise aspired to be more like.
Works for software, too. What’s new is old, and the old stuff is often quite good.
There’s a lot of stuff that was way “ahead of its time”, to borrow an aphorism, but nobody knows this because it hasn’t been “rediscovered”, to borrow another.
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 radio station in the US. I've been a member since before it became my local radio station. Couple other notables are The Current (KCMP) and KEXP.
The other big (meta-) source is surrounding myself with people with similar (or not so similar, but still interesting) music tastes. I've discovered a TON of music like this.
Yes, I've discovered a few things from algorithmic recommendation systems (e.g. spotify). But: (a) the quality of the recommendations hasn't been even close as good, and more importantly (b) there is zero emotional connection (i.e. like saying "oh, this is the band that Eleni showed me when we were camping in Yosemite").
No radio stations have ever played the music I'm looking for so no, this doesn't work for me at all. The majority of stations play top 40, or top R&B/Urban (no idea what the PC description is), top country, class rock. Maybe if you live in LA or NYC there are some other stations with more eclectic selections like say KCRW in LA but I have no interest in what they play.
it is available from outside the UK on the BBC website. alternatively, most (all?) of the BBC radio stream URLs can be found here [1], and consumed with e.g VLC
While great radio stations solve the issue of finding new music, finding great radio stations is even harder than finding new music.
I've been lucky to have moved a few times and discovered some great local radio stations along the way. They still make up the larger part of new music I discover. But I agree, mainstream stations are very unlikely to do this for you, and there's currently no good way to discover good radio stations.
I've discovered so many great artists through FIP, the greatest thing about this one is the themed channels, you're almost guaranteed to always find something good to listen to.
public / college/ indie stations. They usually have online streaming. For all the digging I've done online, radio yields the most unexpected, unheard results. Not always what you want, but still, interesting. Irreplaceable.
My favorite "unexpected surprises" station is BBC "6 Music", which might be called "Radio 6 Music" depending on what you use to listen to it. It's streamable worldwide.
I might be a bit biased since I grew up in the UK, but I recommend it highly. And like all BBC radio, no ads!
+1 to KEXP and KCRW (and KCRW's Eclectic 24). KEXP plays a ton of great music of different varieties of music, some of which, I wouldn't normally listen to.
Absolutely! Radio for me has always been the primary way I discover new music, whether that's back in the day listening to John Peel or Patrick Forge, or nowadays lots of WFMU.org (a decades old New Jersey free-form station) and NTS radio.
I do listen to algorithmic radio sometimes, if I'm in the mood for something specific, but it doesn't feel the same as having a live DJ playing records.
Agreed. I love The Current. When they play a song I don't like I switch to something else whether it is kexp or another genre. (Sadly, one of my favorite hip hop stations beatbasement seems to have gone away. I still haven't found a good replacement for underground hip hop. Gtronic radio is good but not to the same level as beatbasement).
Definitely radio, and I love that the music I hear had been choose by someone, not only an algorithm that knows exactly the songs that will appeal to me. May I ask you what the great radios from Athens (GR) are ?
Also, if you can listen to web radio, give a try to the french station FIP (https://www.fip.fr/) they are actually on strike so it's not as good as usually but it's definitely one of the best music radio out there. Hope you enjoy !
In the Bay Area KFJC (Foothills College/Los Altos) and KZSC (UC Santa Cruz) are also both quite good at playing music many listeners wouldnt otherwise discover.
You can't get them in SF proper, but great for tuning in when you're down south a bit.
This has been exactly my experience. The best music i discovered was by friend’s recommendation. Coincidentally enough, a particual individual called Eleni showed me a lot of interesting prog rock bands over the years. She is also from Greece haha!
Seconding SomaFM! I especially like the DEF CON Radio. I've found some great underground stuff there. (The Music Director is very responsive, asked about an obscure track recently :)
Also note that if you're in Australia with DVB-T reception, Double J and Triple J are on the ABC transponder at ~256kbit MP2 which is the highest quality stream you'll get.
As a listener of Triple J's actual radio content; I think it's become stale and more "mainstream" in recent years however their online stuff: Unearthed, and Double J are great.
KEXP is the best radio station in the US. Jason's departure from the am show is a big loss, but it still kicks ass. Also, a great part of the LA community, year-round.
In the old days there was a service offered to radio stations, they were sending them regularly large curated compilations CDs of the latest potential hits. You could find these CDs on torrent websites and usenet. There must be something similar today.
I'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 the option to search for favorite genres and artists, which should turn up a bunch of new music.
Listening through Soundcloud's playlists is another possibility, though Soundcloud's discoverability has really suffered since they got rid of groups.
Then there are genre-specific subreddits, like r/psybient, r/EBM, r/industrialmusic, etc.
Connecting with people with similar tastes is probably the best way, though.
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.
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 Youtube and just pay for Youtube Premium on the side.
One thing I try to get across to people is that pervasive advertising has harmful side-effects that are difficult to see when you're used to that state. I started universally blocking ads on the web, in media, in apps; I got really aggressive about blocking unwanted content. And I very quickly noticed a change in how long I could focus on content, how quickly I absorbed information, how much effort it was to consume things or interact with things.
It was noticeable enough that I don't think of advertising as free anymore -- you're paying a real cost in mental ability, in your energy. Ads have an effect on your psyche, on how you see the world. I don't think it's healthy.
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 go to bandcamp and buy a FLAC of the tracks you like from the artist. Or you can go to whatever other music service that you think has better quality and get them there.
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.
I have also had really good luck finding music on youtube, especially independent house/electronic music. The youtube recommendation algorithm was really good for music until a few months ago. Not sure what they changed, but I'm seeing the same videos pop up over and over, and those videos are more "mainstream" as well.
People rag on youtube, but I've found so much amazing content on there just by searching around and choosing the next video from the recommended ones so that you go deeper into the rabbit hole.
Youtube's recommendations seems to go through phases, and it depends entirely on the device I use to watch it.
On PC I get one lot of content, on mobile another, and on my Smart TV yet another, despite being signed into the same account everywhere.
The best way I've found to find new music is actually on their app for my Smart TV . Unfortunately the Youtube leanback/tv mode for the PC seems to have disappeared, so it's hard to show how different it is.
It'll show me the same stuff over again, and then randomly every few months it's like "Oh, here's a whole heap of stuff you've never seen before, that's been on the platform for years".
I agree with Youtube, more specifically, channels that focus on bringing attention to new music.
MrSuicideSheep has got to be the most successful instances of this, but there are hundreds more and if you find the right ones for your taste this can be a great source of new music.
The recommendations on the other hand have been so useless that I have been hiding them along with comments for a while now.
Isn't the stuff on YT mostly unofficial uploads where the artist doesn't benefit, whereas with e.g. Spotify at least a couple of pennies (though very little still) are paid to them?
Anyone remember back on what.cd the related artists "web" system? That was my favorite way to find music, and since the site's demise, I have yet to find a comparable way of discovering similar artists.
Luckily back then, I started following many of my favorite artists and labels on social media, which sort of created a new wave of recommendations based on what those artists are talking about. It works, but it's not the same as that magical "web" of suggestions.
Every Noise At Once [1] has a nice web of genres and artists to check out.
From their description: Every Noise at Once is an ongoing attempt at an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 3,883 genre-shaped distinctions by Spotify as of 2020-01-30. The calibration is fuzzy, but in general down is more organic, up is more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier.
I came here to say this. It takes a few minutes to understand what you're looking at, but once you dig in, it's a phenomenal way to discover new music. The auto-generated Spotify lists linked from the top are awesome.
I miss reading the 100 page threads on What.CD about which of the 40 different rips of the White Album was best. Alternatives have popped up, but it saddens me that we lost all of that collective comment history.
I was part of What.CD (and its successors), but if I'm wondering which edition to snatch, I usually search the Steve Hoffman forums [1] and look up the Dynamic Range DB [2].
Interesting. I have never seen that happen and can not reproduce it. Anything special about the browser you use? Feel free to shoot me an email then we can figure it out.
Redacted has filled the gap. Orpheus too. Though maybe the webs aren't as fully developed as WCD's came to be, these sites are definitely maturing in the same way.
I remember what.cd to be a mythical amazing website with impossible to find invite and then close to impossible to maintain ratio starting from 0. Never got an invite and had to use more sane trackers for finding new music, last.fm recommendations and finding soundtracks for watched video clips/movies etc.
Freeleech was one of my favorite ways to discover new music on What.cd even with a buffer well built I'd go for it anyway just to see if I could find something new I liked.
Yep. Can't replace the passion of music lovers. I posted elsewhere in the thread about finding new favorite music just on a whim when it happens to be freeleech.
win96@H+ mail.ch ; switch chem abbreviation for the subatomic particle it represents. https://github.com/WhatCD/Gazelle I'm wondering how they make their similar artist connections, tried looking through the code but only found code pulling from a DB rather than how they generate the db.
BBC 6 Music. Man, does that station ever have its finger on the pulse. You have to be kind of ready for anything, and it's not always easy listening, but you often get pure gold. Not uncommonly, it'll be music that isn't even released yet, or maybe only exists on the artist's Soundcloud page. As a bonus, quite a few of its DJs are famous people who you didn't know are really into some musical niche.
On the other hand, my friend-who-consistently-finds-cool-music pretty much only listens to Soundcloud, and whatever it recommends. It seems to be the most popular platform these days for a certain type of eclectic artist.
Came here to say 6Music too. It's an absolute goldmine and I've discovered some great stuff on there (Nils Frahm, Hannah Peel, Anna Meridith, Erland Cooper, Big Thief). I'm more into contemporary instrumental stuff these days but enjoy other genres, too.
I usually listen to Mary-Anne Hobbs, Tom Ravenscroft, Guy Garvey, Cillian Murphy whenever he's on. Which DJs do you recommend on there?
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 20 college radio stations (or whatever analogue you would consider to be the ideal type of radio for your tastes.)
I've been listening to streaming radio since the early 2000's and one of the main reasons I bought my first smartphone (Palm Treo!) was because I could install a Winamp clone and listen in the car, on headphones, or wherever I was. I still do this today--albeit on a slightly nicer phone.
I've been a DJ/record collector for two decades, run a vinyl marketplace[0], have subscriptions to several streaming sites, and I still get so bored of my own taste and what the algorithms give me. The radio has again become a bit part of my listening in the last few years.
Personal favourites are UK's BBC 6 Music, and a small Lisbon-based station called Oxygenio[1]
As a music enthusiast and collector myself I'm familiar with that feeling as well as the disappointing state of recommendation engines.
However I think it's easy to fall into a habit/routine of constantly looking for and acquiring new (to me) releases when it actually may be a good idea to take a step back, rediscover the collection you already have and go back to passively stumbling upon hidden gems rather than actively seeking them out in a Discogs dive with a few dozen open tabs.
Radio, like NTS[0] as well as the mixes of other curators/DJs have indeed been a great source of inspiration for a more relaxed approach to discovery.
Ironically, very little of the conversation in this thread is discussing the actual link, which is a mailing list of human-reviewed releases.
Most of the comments appear to be about the best algorithmic recommendation engine. I've used them all and still think it doesn't compare to the experience of human-curated music. Even a 1 paragraph review of the record tells me more than a "You might also like [___]" message.
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?
This stuff tends to vary greatly depending on individual tastes and preferences.
That said, some of the ones I like are
- SomaFM (mentioned in these replies already I think)
- KEXP (an actual broadcast station, but I listen online: https://kexp.org)
- Devil's Night Radio (this was taken down and they regrouped under the name KPJK. I only have the link to listen on TuneIn but it's essentially described as "the best dive bar jukebox" with a mix of punk, garage, oldies, rock, sad cowboy songs, and assorted weird stuff. https://tunein.com/radio/KPJK-s263142/)
I am in the very fortunate position that despite living way out in the boonies, I have a proper, brick-and-mortar record store of the High Fidelity kind within an hour's travel from home. Both the guys running it have an encyclopedic knowledge of a number of genres, and there's always a few customers browsing the shelves which will merrily question you about your preferences, before veering off on a tangent, getting into a heated argument with the other patrons and the owner as to what record will be the right one for me, we'll put the winning selection on, eager, anticipating eyes on me as the first chords fill the store, awaiting my reaction...
I love that place.
Point is - while Spotify's algorithms are brilliant at determining what music I might like based on similar music I've listened to in the past, I find there's no substitute for enthusiastic, knowledgeable fans.
I remember in my early twenties there was a drug store with a music part in the town I lived in. The guy running that division was a DJ for different genres. And an wide ranging knowledge and thirst for new stuff. The more he got to know me the better his recommendations got. They were all on the edge and sometimes slightly over the edge.
lots of the stuff I got to know back then I still like to listen to.
I didn't have that much money to spare. Non the less he brought CD after CD to listen to on the players there. sometimes I stayed for 3 to 4 hours just enjoying the music. whenever I had some money to spare I took home a knew jewel of music.
It has been mentioned by others but it bears repetition. From the curated articles to following different labels/artists, it is an incredible resource. I take comfort also knowing they are artist friendly.
The ability to follow artists and labels mailing lists has been a game changer for me. I have a nice fat stack of new music waiting in a folder my inbox for me every morning :)
The tough part about finding new music is that there seems to be a very strong negative correlation between the formation of new bands that produce good music, and, oddly enough, the year when I turned... 25 I think. It was a while back.
This is a terrible guide that ignores the best algorithmic recommendations that spotify provides, the "Related Artist" feature from the artist page. If you are a life long music explorer, why didn't you mention the last.fm Similar Artist feature? Concert reminder services like songkick are great for learning which bands are touring with your favorite artists, too, in addition to suggesting artists based on your current likes. This is low effort.
Spotify's algorithmic recommendations aren't very good. I use Spotify, but always build my playlists by hand, after finding music elsewhere. Typically that's Youtube, but I also follow the artists I like on twitter and get new songs from them.
I don't think Spotify has any good features for finding new artists. I've used all of the ones you mentioned and generally don't like the playlists. Usually they play songs I already know, and the new ones they introduce I just skip. I get a very small hit rate of new music to listen to from Spotify versus other channels.
I think I found your problem. My Discover Weekly is always filled with great new artists I've never heard of, and there's generally at least 3-6 songs that I think are great (and want to explore the artist further). Note that I listened to roughly ~80,000 minutes of music last year (according to Spotify wrapped) with 7,600 songs played, so it wasn't a small amount.
1. If you're subscribed to Youtube Red try Google Play Music (their other probably forgotten service). Their "radio" mode (pick an artist and pick "radio") are vastly superior to Spotify and other services I've used including much better than Youtube/Youtube Music itself.
2. Followers and Influencers
No idea if this is still around but back in 2003-2004 I used to subscribe to Rhapsody (the original music streaming service) and every artist had a list of who influenced them and who they influenced (followers). Those features were huge for me in finding new music.
I like Google Play Music and YouTube Premium. I hate YouTube Music.
YouTube Music imports votes from all of my watched videos, most of which I did not like for their musical content. I get the worst recommendations on YouTube Music.
You just type in artists/genres you like and it'll play music that matches your tastes. It's like a better Pandora, with the things that makes Spotify great, like Spotify Connect.
It's only in the US App Store for dumb reasons, but it works fine elsewhere once you get it downloaded with a US account.
I don't think this is a fair assessment of Spotify. I discover new music all the time through Spotify, here's what I do.
Choose a song, artist or playlist that you really enjoy, right click and select "Go to _______ radio". Spotify will instantly generate a whole new playlist for you based on the selected song/artist/playlist.
I've spent hours discovering new music this way, good luck.
Sadly it always includes songs that I have already liked in every radio that I make and it forces me to listen the same song over and over again until I hate it. I would like radio to suggest music that I haven't liked already...
Maybe Apple Music is a lot worse than Spotify's Artist Radio, because unlike the author, I find lots of awesome new music through Artist Radio. It does work better if you use an obscure artist for your recommendations though.
Word 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 particular reason other than I've been using the iTunes/iPod ecosystem since 2004-5, and thusly my library contains all the music I've already ripped/downloaded.
Spotify's (non-algorithmic) New Music Friday, (algorithmic) Release Radar and Discover Weekly playlists have all been amazing for finding music for me.
I had found their best offerings to be their end of year wrap-ups: “The Ones that Got Away” in 2017 and “Tastebreakers” in 2018, and was disappointed they chose to end 2019 with “Music of the decade”, which was all songs I already knew.
I 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.
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 the difference in categorization of songs.
This might of an somewhat of an outlier case, though.
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?
Same, but my genre profile is very diverse, with a lot of niche stuff, as well as more popular. Somehow Spotify "made for you" playlists manage to not only give me relevant suggestions, but also categorize those suggestions almost perfectly.
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.
Personally i have a playlist that new/interesting songs are added to, so perhaps some site where playlists could be uploaded and then searched would be useful.
Also, i can recommend the Track Radio feature of Tidal.
OP: 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.
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.
I think this could be due to genre bias. There's a new xanax rapper every 60 seconds but fewer folk metal, and the like, partially due to required number of people and overall effort.
> Let’s start with the easy one, newly released music
This kind of tedious labor isn't what comes to mind when I hear "easy" in HN-linked article. And really, what I am trying to achieve doesn't sound complicated at all: I don't even want to be notified in advance, just being told about new release even with a week delay would be fine. Yet I didn't find any efficient way to achieve it!
There must be like 200 artists I know and like in my collection, probably more. Some DJs have literally tens of music projects and go by various handles, which I obviously cannot all remember. Sometimes I find out that some musician I really liked a long time ago before he (supposedly) retired, has started a new project I didn't know about for years. So manually monitoring it all (even assuming consequenceofsound covers everybody I listen, which I really, really doubt) isn't easy by any means. And unlike the author, I don't find it to be a fun hobby, I just want to get notified if my favorite band released a new album this month!
What really frustrates me, is that for some comprehensive music DB like discogs, musicbrainz, last.fm or spotify providing a service like that (I'm pasting 200 artist names => you give me an RSS/email subscription/Telegram bot/whatever) seems like a really trivial thing to do, since it already knows all these relationships and learns about every new release in a matter of hours, if not before the release. Yet to the day I'm not aware that something like this exists, and I tried to find it for a while now.
It's won't necessarily catch every single thing, but Spotify's automatically-generated weekly "Release Radar" does an excellent job of aggregating new releases for me.
I believe it's based on both artists you have explicitly followed on Spotify and also ones you've simply listened to a lot.
Wow, thanks, that seems to be it! Edit: doesn't seem to be actually maintained, though. Very noticeable and quite easy to fix bugs as old as 2017 still persist. But I'll surely try it anyway.
I go to SoundCloud and start following young producers who have the time to repost what they encounter. It is not based on an algorithm, but rather real people who have the time to explore more new music than I have to listen to.
These guys do a great job manually aggregating new music and putting it into mixes. The jokes and fake ads are racy so listen with care: https://soundcloud.com/thunderstone-labs
My extremely modern recommendation for those feeling like they have no good sources: have y'all tried reading more blogs?
I still read Stereogum (which recently went independent again after being owned by Billboard) and Pitchfork. I stay reasonably on top of popular music with them - Stereogum in particular strikes an amazing balance between having good coverage of straight-up pop while still giving coverage to often-ignored genres like hardcore and grime. Their writers certainly have their blindspots, and they are driven by popular label press releases as much honest discovery, but that's kind of why I read them - I want to stay on top of the zeitgeist.
I think if you have specific tastes, you should find sources covering your niches. I also think that if you live in a major city, you may want to find local coverage - I read Brooklyn Vegan, which is (unsurprisingly given the name) also mainly focused on mainstream indie, also but covers a lot of smaller artists who are coming through NYC soon. I've managed to see a lot of live music I never would have heard of thanks to them.
I am also interested in working on better ways to discover music. I've been working on a small Twitter-like social network for sharing new music on and off for the past few years, somewhat comparable to This Is My Jam. It doesn't do any fancy algorithms or anything, it just presents music your friends post in a form that's easy to listen back to (via Spotify and Apple Music SDKs - would love to have more sources someday, but Soundcloud and Bandcamp don't really have APIs for this, and obviously hosting content is a minefield). I'm watching the comments on this thread closely for inspiration on this - right now I've just been using it with a couple friends and thinking about how it might expand in the future :)
Agreed. Their charts are a good way to find recommendations, especially if you filter by particular genres you like. Also good is to look at lists by users who like something you like.
Approximately 30% of his likes are IMO absolute unlistenable shit, 60% is just pretty good, but the last 10% is pure damn gold that I usually would not have heard of otherwise.
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.
WeAreHunted was the best, until Twitter put a bullet in it's head. I think it was reincarnated as wonder.fm, but never really seemed to regain the mojo from those early days...
WeAreHunted was mind-blowingly consistent and effective. As long as I "liked" things I enjoyed, I almost never felt the need to skip whatever it presented.
It worked off of music blogs, with the idea that at any given time, some collection of blogs/bloggers would have found the next big thing.
The founder is an interesting guy who is currently currently providing VC for a bunch of ideas, one of which is using AI to make music. Their demos are pretty interesting.
I created http://poyo.co/soundcloud2 as an extremely bare-bones extrapolation of how I find music on sound cloud, and it's fun to use. It build a little graph of the top-likers of a track, and their top-likes.. you can then go to one of the other songs by double clicking and starting the process again. You often find yourself far from your bubble of music.
That's pretty cool, I know what I'll be doing today!
What are the black dots? Listeners? If so it would be great if clicking them actually opened up their soundcloud profile. As another small suggestion, it would be nice with a title on mouseover on both the orange and black dots.
For anyone looking for background music to work to, check out Apple Music's "Pure Focus" playlist. It's a downtempo goldmine. I put it on on the background—while coding, daily.
Used to use Soma FM the most before I discovered a few playlists on Apple Music like: Beatstrumentals, Loops and my new fav Pure Focus. I feel like the Goa Chill type tunes on Soma FM got a bit much for me.
When 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.
If you're looking for new music but don't want to dig into it, I suggest just looking for remixes of songs you already love.
Myself and a friend became radio hosts for our college radio (KBVR, national award winners) and I realized this was a great opportunity to learn about and discover new music. Over the next year, every week I would go onto YouTube and follow suggestions from some music I already knew until I got into weird stuff that I'd never heard before. Before long I found thriving subcultures of not only fresh and modern EDM, but also really awesome remixes of existing music. Finding remixes of music I already loved was a thrilling experience, I've never had so much fun looking for music online.
One day I found this gem of a Kenny Chesney "American Kids" remix and ripped it to my laptop to play on that week's show. Maybe a few days after, the song was gone due to copyright violation. Now I can't find any trace of this glorious mix online, only in my personal stash.
If anyone is interested, I highly suggest Majestic Casual on YouTube, and The Magician on SoundCloud.
Not everyone's choice in music can be heard 48 consecutive times in 20 time periods on the radio, or on the radio at all, so ya gotta go look for it. Hard target searches, rabbit holes on Google etc...for me, I love heeeavy music, black metal, deathcore, slamming death metal are my go to favorite genres. Radio doesn't play that type stuff so, I've found myself literally picking a band out of the air, do a Google search on them, find their albums, pick a few songs, listen to them on youtube if I like them enough chances are I'll buy the album.
Sure I've wasted cash on what I thought was a solid album from a new band I just found but it's the name of the game imo. Music is incredibly important to me so losing a few bucks on a shit album isn't that bad, I mean it sucks ass but it is what it is. I've found bands that I absolutely fell in love with and have been a huge fan since the day I found them, it's a risk I'm willing to take. Its paid off waayyy more times then not.
I've been subscribed to Google Play Music for years now, mainly because I'm still on the intro $8.99/month rate. Finding new music on Play is pretty difficult, occasionally, some of the playlists do surface artists I've never heard of before.
So been resorting to a few different ways to find new music.
When I use to live in Boston, I would check the gig calendars of the places I loved going to. They tended to be smaller venues where more unknown artists played. I remember once seeing Imagine Dragons as a support at the Brighton Music Hall. Boston is full of wonderful small gig venues.
Now, when I visit different cities and places, I'll follow the venues on FB so I can easily see the gig calendars. I pretty much use FB as a bookmarker for venues and bands now.
Also, I recommend a cool site called Indishuffle, it's curated by a bunch of humans around the world (I believe).
My admittedly old-school way of finding new music is the following:
1) Put a link to my last.fm profile in my forum signature.
2) Ask people to review what I listen to and make recommendations.
This has been infinitely more useful than the standard machine-generated recommendations, particularly when it comes to specific sub-genres and the like. A human who sees I have Black Sabbath, Sleep, and Pentagram in my rotations but not Pantera, Korn, or Slipknot in my list is probably going to implicitly understand that I don't like nu-metal, and will recommend something within the traditional heavy metal or doom metal genres.
The machine algorithms, on the other hand, think it's all just "heavy metal", and will then send me bogus recommendations for Marilyn Manson and other crap that I'm never going to touch.
1. Look for covers of stuff by older bands you love. Sometimes you don't find much, sometimes you hit the jackpot - I sure never would have run into Kobra and the Lotus's awesome mystical metal if I hadn't gone hunting for covers of Rush's "The Spirit of Radio" one day, for instance.
2. Go onto whichever of the social medias you have the biggest active following on. Say something like "I have $100 to spend on some new music, what is something awesome y'all think I should be listening to?"
Again, not everything you get is gonna be a winner. But all these responses are gonna be from people who clearly have good taste, after all, they're already listening to you right?
I think a different problem that some people may be thinking of when they post this question is: how do I find new music which is like this given song?
It's a narrower question but all the more interesting for it. Most algorithmic recommendations rely on "other people who played a cumulative ten tracks from this artist played ten tracks from this other artist" or pretty vague slices of tag-clouds intersecting along n dimensions, or worse yet influencers who are perpetually hyped up about a n new thing, and that can generate some new-to-you recommendations, yet I long to find ways of answering the former question.
Get Roon. Get Tidal (or spotify or whatever). Get a cheap tablet like a Fire. Throw a party, invite people to brunch, coffee. Pass the tablet around so people can pick music they like. Did this all last summer and expanded my collection massively. For example, somehow I had forgotten of the existence of Massive Attack, while I was playing something else (Vangelis perhaps) my brother took the tablet, found and played Teardrop. Haven't stopped listening to it since.
During parties, rarely are people upset with the choice of whoever has their hands on the tablet, but very often delighted by new things or reminded of old things.
I'm kind-of amazed at how neither the post nor any of the comments mention music blogs or music publications.
Pitchfork has been an outstanding resource for me over the years. It's helped me find music that wasn't necessarily aligned with the music I already knew and liked. Because I'm a pretty avid P4K reader, I feel it's turned me on to new artists -- hell, even entire genres -- that I probably would not otherwise discover on my own (and which Spotify definitely would not recommend to me). They have very thorough coverage of new music, though it tends to skew slightly less mainstream. Check it out!
I've found that the "radiodroid" Android app (no affiliation), with very many (thousands of?) internet radio stations listed, is a fun way to explore or find things I know I want to search for, or random things. It is built from the free source code by the f-droid.org app store (which I also like, also no affiliation). I wrote a few more facts here (no sales, simple): http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854574943.html .
One of rdio's feature I miss the most is their friend view. Not only would you see what friends were currently listening too, but a full history of songs.
If I was in a mood for something knew, I'd look at Joe's feed, because I knew he was always hunting great new indie bands. If I wanted obscure world music, I'd see what Sam had been listening to, and so on.
It was so simple, but worked so well.
These days Spotify just shows me what people are currently listening to. It requires people to make a playlist (and share it) if you want a similar experience.
Going to reddit and asking for music suggestions on one of the normie subreddits is a profoundly bad idea, unless you are just venturing out of your bubble. Same goes for most social media websites. The trick is to find some genre specific or scene specific groups and find your way into it. And that is the big issue - discoverability.
I also strongly believe that Pandora, Spotify, etc. are taking money from artists and/or labels to directly market. It's a shame, because these apps could be awesome discovery tools.
Having conversations about music with people is half the fun in my mind. It’s a creative medium so talking to people that have unexpected associations leads to lots of wonderful surprises in discovering new music. Also having context is also a huge part of deriving pleasure from a piece.
Algorithms that feed you stuff that all sounds similar is great if you need background music while you do chores or studying, etc. but for when you are listening to stuff more actively conversations with people is essential in my mind.
For me local radio, like KEXP in Seattle, is how I find new and exciting music I might not have listened to otherwise. It has become my go-to channel for when I want something on.
I use "Boil the Frog" to find new music - just put in two diverse artists that are already in your playlist, and it'll make a playlist connecting the two.
Just make sure you take the most diverse artists in your existing library - that way you get the most variation in the new playlist generated for you:
Well, at the risk of being downvoted and losing points in heaven: (i'm sure SOMEONE will be disturbed that I actually suggest new music in lieu of merely pontificating upon the subject of how to find new music)
These days I find tons of new music through https://daily.bandcamp.com/ . No blinders, you'll get hip-hop, then doom metal, then Philippines traditional music. I like this much more than recommendation engines that only make little circles around what you know.
And buying music on Bandcamp, musicians get a fairer share than they do on big platforms.
daily.bandcamp and their weekly radio show is pretty huge for my discovery along with a mishmash of npr, kexp, bleep, reddit, brooklyn vegan and nts radio
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.
Look at the calendars of venues that you like. Their whole job is curation, and they book lots of local bands. Throw one song from each band playing at each venue for the next month into a playlist and listen through it a couple times -- almost surely you'll find new artists you didn't know about, and guess what? Their show is just around the corner.
If you care about music, find human creators and curators (record labels, well-run stores, reviewers, DJs, etc) you like and pay attention to what they're doing. Talk to them, even. There are likely some of these people within a degree or two of you socially.
Use algorithms only if you're at a complete loss and need a bit of help serendipitously stumbling onto any of the above, but don't rely on them.
A lot of people are mentioning bandcamp, which is great for exploring new music, but there's also this tool: http://campexplorer.io/ which lets you search using multiple tags. It has worked perfectly for me when I'm trying to hone in on very specific sub-genres of metal. :) One of my favorite tools ever.
I used to listen to Radio Paradise some years ago, had forgotten about it. They are really good. This is kind of interesting:
"Radio Paradise got its start in Paradise, California (hence the name...). Paradise is a peaceful little town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, far from the big city stress & turmoil. Our goal is to bring a little Paradise into your life, wherever you're located."
I first heard of Paradise from this station, and considered moving there a few years ago to be closer to my daughter in nearby Chico. A bit over a year ago Paradise was tragically hit by a huge wildfire nearly wiped the town off the map and reduced the population by 90%. It sounds like Radio Paradise moved away before the fire, since they still imply that Paradise is stress free, etc. ... I don't see a single mention of the fire on the site. That seems really odd to me.
Here's how you find new music: peer to peer. Soulseek is what I recommend. The value is unlocked when you search for something relatively niche. You'll find users that have what you're looking for and can then browse their shared directory and download other stuff that you haven't heard of but appears interesting. If you like what you find, buy it. P2P is life.
On the word of mouth front:
I started music group on various platforms; Play 3 Playlist Fridays
Basic premise is that on Fridays people share their own 3 song playlist of whatever genre, theme, etc that they care to. I'd say it has been moderately successful. 3 songs once a week is a low enough bar for contribution, but still high enough that people tend to put some actual thought into it.
I usually use a website Sputnik Music. Once every couple months I look at their charts for best new releases, and listen to a snippet of each new album on Spotify and just work my way down. I usually end up with a couple new artists/albums to listen to each time. It’s pretty time consuming but it’s how I’ve found almost all my music the last few years.
In the early 00s I figured out how to rip Library CDs. They had a surprising amount of NuMetal.
During the mid-00s CNet had a music directory that was manually maintained. Looking back on it now, whoever coded the web page probably just put on whatever music they liked there. It was a great way to find new music.
I worked full-time on algorithmic music recommendation for about 5 months last year[1] (started working on it as a side project in 2016). I've always thought that, ultimately, an algorithm should be the best--after all, you can have it use human-curated data as an input. While my algorithm isn't amazing, it works far better for me than Spotify or Pandora ever did, so I've been using it myself regularly. I pivoted to a general-purpose recommender system idea[2] last november, but I'd love to go back and work more on music later on.
(Music was just too hard to get started in--I spent far more time trying to find a way to integrate my algorithm into playback sources than actually working on the algorithm)
It's basically Spotify's recommendation system with a bunch more parameters for you to play with and the UI is designed so you can go through the recommendations quickly.
Listen to KCRW radio.
Listen to DJs that play the genre of music you like.
Radio is still the best way to disconver new music.
Gilles Peterson on BBC Radio 6 is also another one of my go-to's.
I appreciate an eclectic mix of recently released music (KCRW) and jazz, world, tasteful hip hop, etc. (Gilles).
https://mediamonarchy.com/
The best source, bar none, for new music on the www.
Covers all the bases music, memes and media, daily, m-f.
The discord channel plays live streams of the music program 3PM Eastern.
https://archive.org/details/netlabels Nobody mentions this one. It's a shame really because there's lot of tracks here. I guess Spotify etc. has beaten the scene.
Most of my favorite music albums from the last couple of years I discovered with sputnikmusic.com by following certain reviewers and their news and charts.
It worked really well at exploring different genres and music I otherwise would have never listened to before but can't get enough of now.
I wish there was more stuff like Indoek Mixtape Mondays. Never heard something on those releases that I'd ever heard before. Very breadth first search strategy.
I feel like the issue is we need a better beam width on most of these search strategies. Or maybe a better approach to beam width?
I really wish Apple Music just had a list (station? Whatever) I could listen to that showed me music I’m likely to enjoy based on the thousands of songs I have ‘liked’ in my library.
I was disappointed to find that didn’t exist when I signed up. It’s what I was looming forward to the most.
It does. Go to the "For You" tab, and pick "New Music Mix"
I don't understand why this algorithmic playlist gets such a bad rap. On any given week, I've only heard about about 15% of the artists on the list at most; I usually find 2-3 new artists whose catalog I want to sample, one or two tracks from artists I already like but have new albums I didn't know about, everything else maybe not a keeper but definitely listenable.
… new Black Lips, Wire and Rubber Band Gun this week, cool!
In addition to some of the sources mentioned in this HN thread, I let myself be spammed (bacn'd?) by various physical music stores that have a focus on music I like.
Also, more applicable to electronic music perhaps, listen to live sets / radio mixes by artists I like.
YouTube, either via finding a channel I like, a playlist, or via recommended videos. It's how I've been finding music for years now, highly recommend, plus I like reading people's comments on the tune.
How the hell does this useless blog post get so many upvotes?
It's pretty much useless (Ask around and overloaded subs? Really??). Even the page it advertises is useless.
I just wish spotify would give us an "all songs by this artist" page. Clicking through like 10 albums is tedious especially when they often have 1 or 2 songs in them.
If learning a new language, it's still amazing how you can find large and well developed music scenes for pretty much any genre you already like, in your target language.
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 Apple Music playlists, these are great ways to find new music. What's on popular radio stations generally just annoys my friends and I.
Between the terrible selection of music, spotty audio quality, and ads, there's never been a worse time to pick radio.
A number of low power radio stations came online after the 2013 application window with the FCC. These are hyper local and often very diverse and essentially equivalent to word of mouth. My city has more than one, they cover the city limits and some of the suburbs. One in particular is full of music nerds playing their own niches for an hour or two every week. I do a show myself :)
89.3 The Current -- based out of Minneapolis -- has a great selection. Totally independent. Not all the DJs play the same music, which is a double-edged sword, but you can count on healthy variety of new and old and many genres.
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.
soulseek is still around.
I use a linux program called nicotine, got my collection shared for people to see and download, sometimes have a look who was downloading my stuff and have a look at their files.
It hit a software filter because of past activities by spammers or trolls. I've cleared that now so it won't happen again.
Please don't post like this in the threads. If you have a question or see a problem, send it to us at [email protected], as the site guidelines ask (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) so we can answer you and fix the issue. If you post to the thread instead, you not only add off-topic noise, the odds are high that we won't see your comment and so can't do anything about it. I only saw this one at random.
-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 are and who they like currently
-If they're on a small, focused label (Amphetamine Reptile, Elephant 6), go listen to their labelmates