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
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
The YouTube algorithm is sometimes surprisingly good. Like “Listen to this band with 47 plays!” and then it’s a banger.
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.
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.
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
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 🙌
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
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.
There’s some pretty good YouTube channels geared for that, you just have to find the ones with the vibes you like. And once you’re into one those channels, youtube gets very good at recommending more of those channels.
I really like Music for empty rooms they have a lot of all kind of ambient music, jazz, niche psychedelic rock, old disco/soul, really hard to find japanese music, international older instrumental stuff 60s-80s. Overall more niche I guess, I love them, give a try, they update everyday, sometimes a full album. And The art of listening they post less often, but it’s always full albums and they have much more recent stuff, and they have a very diverse repertoire of styles outside of the most popular rock-pop. From all around the world.
To add to your sites:
- Last.fm, especially the “Similar Albums” section on Album pages and the “Similar to” section on Artist pages.
- Sharethreads on 4chan’s /mu/: The download links in older threads might be dead, but it still might be useful for discovering new music.
- “Essential [insert genre] Charts”
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.
