Call me basic, but I have no shortage of new music from Spotify and YouTube. Spotify recommendations plus shared playlists from friends. There are a handful of YT channels that host pretty consistent quality musicians, like NPR Tiny Desk, KEXP, Colors Studios, Zildjian Live.

I use rateyourmusic.com to research a genre/artist/ album and then follow where it leads me. It’s amazing how much music is outside the algorithms, and then you get to find them in a differ context too.

I stream online radio while commuting.

It’s a great way of discovering what people in other countries listen to or what is happening in certain genres etc.

The small online stations are better than ordinary radio because they usually don’t have commercials and no need to attract large numbers of listeners so they don’t always play the most popular garbage over and over.

It’s as if removing all the commercial aspects of radio makes better radio.

I downloaded what I liked. Now I am stuck with them

Spotify auto-generated playlists

I am still riding the MP3 train. Music from indies and smaller bands I buy on Bandcamp or directly from the artist. Bigger bands from larger labels and really obscure stuff I get from Soulseek.

Discovering music got more difficult after leaving Reddit, I lurked on a lot of genre subs. Now I mostly find new stuff through friends or Youtube recommendations.

Spotify (Web app with ublock and cracked APK), songs from movies/shows, and songs discovered from content creators on twitch and YouTube

metal-archives.com

Mostly YouTube recommendations and long compilation videos people have posted to YouTube.

Favourites currently are:

• Internet radio. Especially radiofreefedi.net which features music from people on the fediverse. I especially like their comfy channel. #radiofreefedi #RFF

• Music podcasts. The Add To Playlist podcast from the BBC is my favourite. Each track they add is inspired by the previous one. Loads of great music, plus interesting guest musicians talking about music history, theory and vibes.

• ViMusic. This is an open source front end app for YouTube music on android. No payment, adds etc. You can get it on f-droid. Found a few cool tracks via the algo but not as many as previous options.

I have to say though that, like the boomers who went before me, I feel that music in general has become worse. I’m blaming the ‘winner takes all’ effect of commercial streaming platforms for the narrowing of artistic culture and the debasement of musicians.

I may sound old, but I still use Pandora and it has been one of my best avenues for new music and artists for the last 15 years I’ve had my account. It knows my tastes very well at this point and the recommendations are almost always spot on.

Pandora works pretty well for discovery, and has multiple “modes” so you can hear album tracks, not just hits. Just put in a few songs of a genre and/or artists you like to build a station of similar suggestions. Use thumbs up/down to tune it. I will warn you that after a year of doing this, it might get in a rut of playing things you’ve already thumbed up. If that happens, switch modes or create a new station.

YouTube suggestions also has a pretty decent suggestion algorithm if you start thumbing up music you like. It’s also a good place to look at a particular label’s catalog.

Both are free with ads.

Also, if there’s an artist you like, be sure to look up who produced your favorite tracks. Chances are they’ve done similar music with other artists.

Listen? Stream my own collection from media server.

Discover? I asked friends and relatives to send me mix CDs instead of presents. I listen to broadcast radio when I rent a car and sometimes at home; Chirp, the Chicago Independent Radio Project is especially nice because they don’t have ads and DO have personality. Every so often I punch a few songs into a new Pandora station and spin the wheel. I snoop my kid’s Spotify account to make sure that what they’re listening to is appropriate (has to have a little talk when I found some ICP about misogyny, for example) and to their mortification shamelessly take whatever I like.

I have a Spotify playlist consisting of songs to download and add to the media server; that represents my “new music” since I paused buying it during the pandemic belt-tightening. It’s over two days long. But with Google Play Music dead, I don’t even know where to buy MP3s these days.

Youtube.

I realised a few years back that my music tastes had stagnated, that I hadn’t liked any new bands in… too many years, and that I was on the way to becoming to be a stuck-in-the-past old fart.

So I nuked my youtube data to glass and started again from scratch with The Technique.

Open all the interesting-looking music in new tabs, don’t-recommend-channel annoying crap, especially reaction videos. Flick through each tab, like and add to genre playlists anything cool, and open a bunch of tabs from the recommendations on that page. If I get three solid bangers from an artist, subscribe. Go with original artists rather than reposts where possible.

Rinse and repeat.

If the algorithm starts getting stale, browse and listen through playlists I want to hear more of (often using a third-party shuffle site), to dredge up the silt.

I don’t generally listen to much of a song while browsing - you can tell from a handful of samples if it’s for you or not, and moving on quickly stops it from getting tedious.

I have found and enjoyed vastly more new music in the last few years than I did in the two decades before that. It’s awesome.

I have a Signal group with friends, one of whom listens to all new metal releases and gives reviews of the new releases.