Music

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.

BrooklynVegan

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

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"

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

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.

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.

Used to be what.cd

Now it's just hopes and prayers

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.

last.fm has awesome algorithms.

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.

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.

Recommendations from friends/random socials/memes. Discovered Wind Rose through a Deep Rock Galactic meme. 😂

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.

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

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.

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

Once upon a time there was this beautiful music player called Songbird that aggegated music blogs and let you directly download MP3s. It was magical.

Now I use Soundcloud, which has been awesome for discovering new music.

Also, don't sleep on the Internet Archive. There is some awesome music hosted there, often in FLAC.

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.

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.