Youtube nprs tiny desk concert. Got so many banger musicians and GREAT music.
I go on Pirate Bay, search through new uploads, then check their videos on YouTube. Found plenty of gems I'd otherwise not have encountered. Also on LastFM. Type an artist you like and it will suggest similar artists.
I quaff the grape's nectar and doth play diverse melodies from Spotify until I chance upon a tune that pleases me.
I don't think I ever found music. the music tended to find me.
I spent about 20 years getting stuck in the past while the culture got away from me; I just hadn't got into any bands since the early 2000s, and it was getting pretty sad.
I also have pretty bad ADHD - music fucks up my ability to concentrate on language-based tasks, so I can't just play stuff in the background while I do something else - and sitting there staring through multiple songs in a row just isn't going to happen.
So I had a great idea: turn it into a game.
I nuked my youtube data completely, started again from scratch, and set out, not so much to discover new music, but to train the algorithm to fetch me cool stuff. How well can I nudge the thing into a model of stuff I tend to like?
- Open the home feed, and start going through it
- Reaction videos, influencers, other garbage, hit don't recommend channel.
- Any music videos, open in new tab
- Rinse and repeat until I have a ridiculous number of tabs open
- Go through each tab:
- Skip through representative chunks of song, get at least 20 seconds of music in before making a decision
- If you just don't like it, close the tab and move on.
- If you do like it:
- If it's not posted by the original artist account, go find the original instead if possible.
- Hit like
- Save to playlists for whatever genres it seems to fit, plus a catch-all list (set public, for reasons I'll explain)
- Open a few new tabs off the sidebar
- If you find three solid bangers from one artist, subscribe.
- When you run out of tabs, refresh the home feed.
It's adjustable to suit my attention span at the time - if I need the dopamine I just skim more, if I want to chill I let it play longer.
It fits into spare minutes of downtime at work etc.
I have discovered SO MUCH amazing new music, and my tastes have expanded in all kinds of directions. I've started not only recognizing but actually having opinions on bands I see on posters as I walk down the street, which is just plain ridiculous for me.
I have gone down some weird and amazing rabbit holes, from Armenian music to Femtanyl.
Probably the best thing I've ever done, srsly.
Sometimes the algorithm can get stale, and you end up with a streak of bland, safe stuff that all seems the same.
When this happens, find one of the many third-party playlist-shuffle sites (because the built-in shuffle is still horribly broken), and feed it either your main playlist or some of the genre-specific ones you feel aren't getting enough love, and listen through a bunch of songs there to dredge up the silt. (you may need to open them in separate tabs; the embed doesn't always update your watch history properly). And this is why the lists need to be public, so third-party sites can browse your playlists.
Yeah, I've had a realization a few days ago when I checked out about a dozen songs that had north of 10 million views on YT, but I've never heard of them, at all, or of the artists behind them. And all of those were from some 10 years ago. So I guess my taste in music is kind of frozen in time and I've been trying for a while to complete collections of "old" artists rather than getting to know new ones.
I do get occasional inspiration from the folks at I Love Music, though.
Through my Apple Music “New Music” weekly playlist before I canceled my subscription. It does a good job so long as you actively love and dislike tracks.
Now I have a local library that syncs with last.fm for every play and you can discover new music and artists through there.
I’m no longer on it but instagram was actually a great way to discover new artists. Seems that meta will be a significant player in the music industry (major UMG deal) soon as well so who knows what’s coming there.
I'm mainly interested in old time fiddle tunes. I get them from youtube recommends sometimes, or from going to jams and hearing a cool tune, or someone I play with wants to learn a tune. I often post tunes I like on my old-time music lemmy community.
Bandcamp mostly. They do writeups sometimes like "the best metal from Colorado" or "a deep dive into acid jazz". They seem to be human written too and not ai slop, at least in the past.
Also seeing who's playing with who. If I like band A, and band B is opening for them, well I'll check out band B. I saw "Year of the Cobra" play with "The Well" and it was a good show, and I bought their album.
Yup, Bandcamp. You can also click on "Genres", then clicking on any genre will propose further subgenres. So currently i'm in a atmospheric black metal phase. Going to "metal", "black Metal", then "atmospheric black metal" shows me bands i might like.
Obviously genres are very fluid and sometimes subjective, but as a general tool to find music they work for me.
Theuppermostinlife curates a bunch of music they like, and I share some of their taste so that's where I get a bunch of new stuff from.
Community radio, my kids (and they find music through me too), YouTube music recommendations, opening bands at concerts, and sometimes NPR.
Mostly through movies/tv shows or sometimes NPR Tiny Desk
Currently working my way through 1,001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die with some friends using this website: https://1001albumsgenerator.com
Oh wow, nice share
There's been a decent amount of activity at !sessionjams@sh.itjust.works and the music is always all over the place. Popular music, obscure music, non American music, pretty much everything depending on the day.
I browse and occasionally contribute as you know but I really think the community would benefit from some organisation in the form of post title rules over there.
Having a standardised "artist - track title" format or even "artist - track title (genre)" seen as it is such a varied selection over there would really make the browsing experience a lot better than a massive list of just song names in my opinion.
I was going to make a post on the community about this but seen as I see you here I thought I'd just make the suggestion directly to you. I think it would be a positive thing for the community going forward :)
There's definitely merit in what you're saying but I'm also fine with it staying how it is.
The idea is that it should be easy to share what you have on, but we're all using different services. IMO the easiest thing is using Lemmy's title filling feature which is the song name by default with Spotify links. I believe the other services like YouTube and tidal work similarly.
Many of the posts in that community are made by members while they are working, which also makes me hesitant to enforce title rules on them. Quick and easy posts are easy to blast out when all you have is a second or two. Maybe in time as it becomes more than just a handful of people posting it should be revisited.
FWIW I'm ok with the communities I create never becoming popular on Lemmy. Most are created for a small group of friends to mess around on where other services don't fit the bill. I'd much rather have fun posting when the mood strikes than worry about fitting a particular posting guideline. If like-minded people happen to join in, awesome. If not, we were having fun before and we'll continue to have fun without them!
Just contributed myself, and subbed. Always looking for a good jam after a good smoke.
Always nice to have more music in the rotation, thanks for posting!
Nice
Anymore it's either through yt recommendations or sometimes I'll see other people recommending songs and decide to look them up.
Very cool. Kind of like how Pandora used to be when it first started.
This thread is throwing up gold
Awful.
Find a stoner buddy whose autistic special interest is music and music history. You'll have endless recommendations for cool shit.
Source: One of my best mates' autistic special interest is music and music history.
As for me personally, I like looking up music and genres specific to local areas, particularly those from other cultures. Afrobeat's been big on my mind ever since I discovered it, and I've been having good luck searching through old Zamrock albums.
You should post to !noyank@lemmy.ml – it's a world-culture comm
I've been paying for a Pandora subscription for about a decade. Worth it. (Piracy is a service problem.)
Their recommendations for similar bands, auto play, and making stations from a band or song has let me discover so much music over the years.
(Piracy is a service problem.)
Piracy isn't a problem.
I mean, I have a home server setup with 32 terabytes of NAS in a RAID 5 running the *Arrs and Jellyfin pulling from Usenet. Also running Calibre and paying for Anna's.
Like I told a friend that got huffy with me over how I do my sailing, "I been pirating since you had babyteeth."
You can be prickly if you want, but increased piracy is a symptom of a service problem. If Netflix hadn't gone to shit, I'd still be using it. I'm considering paying for Samsung's art subscription for my TV.
I will pay a reasonable price for convenient media. Make it difficult or expensive enough, and I'll sail the high seas. Time is money.
I really don't care how Kanye does anything.
Different pronunciation. Kanye's ye is "yay" while the plural second person pronoun "ye" is pronounce like "Yee"
I don't know wwhat that means
Are you Irish? Those are the only people I've heard use "ye" for the plural "you". Which is a shame, because it has a nice ring to it. Ye and Y'all are like yin and yang
It's a joke, he changed his name to Ye
Typo in your title. Kanye is known as "Ye".
A friend recommended pitchfork yesterday to me. Haven't gotten around to it though
I have a large list on bandcamp that I follow to try and stay up with as many releases as I can, also following relevant genre "tags" on there to get recommendations from artists I may not know about. The genre tags can be hit and miss though due to artists often being unable to tag their work properly.
I'll also listen to shows on SoundCloud and will search out tracks and new artists I hear on there. I'll also occasionally check the Juno charts if I have run out of new music to listen to and in the last year started building up a follow list on Spotify to check new releases there that I may have missed from all the other avenues.
Sorry, but Spotify Discover Weekly of course.
And I also always have Shazam ready to go for when out and about.
Spotify daylist (search for it). Better than discover weekly imo, and changes multiple times during the day.
I don't use Spotify anymore, but I miss Discover Weekly. When it missed, it really missed, but I still found a lot of artists through it.
I subscribe to the digital stream of radio stations through my podcast app. WFUV out of New York City, WXRV out of I don't know where, some random station out of Sydney, Australia I stumbled on that has an EDM DJ on at the same time I'm waking up on the weekends.
I also have Spotify, but I tend to get better recommendations from real human DJs at radio stations.
Bandcamp Features
At the moment? Watching Anime. A few years ago? Watch music videos of songs I already know on youtube and see what the algorithm spits out.
Yoasobi slaps.
I'm 57 and I mostly don't. I have built up a large collection of favourite bands and songs and tend to just stick to them.
Do you mentally criticise yourself for being boring?
Not really. I like quite a wide range of stuff, so I don't get bored with it.
youtube shuffle works great, its truly random, give it a try.
Bandcamp follows and whatever is playing on CBC music.
I follow a bunch of hash tags on Mastodon.
Listenbrainz has decent recommendations
A simple combination of Spotify, searching for recommendations, as in "artists similar to _____," checking out AllMusic for a brief overview and maybe which album to start with.
I used to use r/listentothis, haven't in a long time though, not even out of "fuck you reddit" just busy I think.
