I use Google Play & browse their new releases every couple days. Same with youtube music. I also love using Youtube Musics personal radio because it plays both songs it knows you like & stuff that's similar in a really good balance. So I don't have to skip too much stuff but it's not only throwing me stuff I've listened to a bunch.
YouTube with auto play turned on. Play one song you like, and more of the same genre will usually follow. YouTube has a lot of good music that isn’t available on music sites such as Spotify.
Seconded. I really like the auto generated playlists, all music that I like + each once in a while a new similar song that sometimes I don't even notice until I think to myself "hey what was that nice song?".
Youtube runs into islands. After a point, you are stuck in some domain of music and music starts repeating. Next time I sample a song, it very quickly progresses to songs I know and I'm back in that same island.
In my opinion, it needs a "discover" setting in autoplay where it amps up discovery and reduces chances of reaching songs I know.
I can usually go a whole afternoon without songs being repeated, unless I manually choose a new song. Then I sort of end up back in the same playlist all over again. But if it were not for YouTube, there are so many good songs I would have never heard.
Oh, I agree with you! I know a lot of music only courtesy of youtube, but I can't explore the neighboring region of those songs I've repeated a number of times. Maybe it's just in how I discover in a very narrow music domain, I don't know.
This will forever be my White Whale, but I could have sworn that there was an old version of the Youtube Music app that had a radio/autoplay feature with a slider from 'very similar' to 'wildly different'. I totally overlooked it at the time but now I can't seem to find anything online about it. Such a shame because I love finding weird songs.
RateYourMusic (you can see "top" charts of any genre rated by users of the site collectively, or find user-made lists) and 4chan's /mu/ board (chart threads). There's a lot of new stuff on Bandcamp that's worth checking out, but it means you miss out on older stuff and the things that define genres.
I used to say DCPP (for others I suppose BitTorrent), but it requires connections, effort, and nowadays streaming is hype, and it works.
If you want to spend minimal effort the suggestions by Spotify (just keep on playing, or select one of the 6 lists) can be good. Also, if you like an artist on Spotify, you see on the right some related artists.
YouTube has this feature as well, but make no mistake: YouTube Autoplay is garbage compared to Spotify's. Why? YouTube's too broad, and it spams you. For Spotify you get locked in a subset of genres based on your playlist. I share Spotify with my family (partner and daughter). We all have different preferences, and this is reflected in different lists.
Do note that Spotify saves everything you do there (as was in the news the other day). As does YouTube. If you desire privacy, use an offline solution.
bandcamp. it's turned into a bit of a community, and you can rest assured that sales go to the releasing entity (8% bandcamp fee.) as well as not shunting sales into low-return streaming.
I use it both for my musical releases and for finding new music across the spectrum.
The entities putting music on there are largely the ones making it, not some corporate entities that don't have time for fans... (itunes, spotify, all the other corporate rarified sales channels that require consolidators for even underground labels, and never deign to directly work with lowly artists LOL)
I like listening to their Bandcamp Weekly, a pseudo-radio show that highlights new releases. It's not as diverse as Bandcamp itself, as the DJ seems to be mostly into hybrid jazz/ambient/hiphop/world, but if you like that sort of thing, you should definitely take a listen.
I also try to go see live music as much as I can, as I often find favorite artists who are opening for the band I went to see.
I recently got tired of streaming, and started collecting music the "old" way and rebuilding my library.
Bandcamp has been awesome for this. $10 for a DRM-free album in Flac is perfect, most other services are charging double that for lossless downloads. It's a win-win that the sales go more to the artists as well.
For me it was a promise that headphones (can't remember where I found this but I think it's still on github) should have compelled... But I never got to make it work...
So I find new songs when watching series or even on YouTube.
For me the best is Radio Paradise (free eclectic radio on the internet) it's more "old" stuff than new stuff but I discovered so much quality music (and still discover new things)
That hardly ever works for me. It's either "here's another artist that's like these ones, only more mediocre" or completely crazy ones, like a playlist of the album Ilana (The Creator) by Mdou Moctar, a Berber electric guitarist, where Spotify recommendations are all for Tyler The Creator.
Yeah, I love Tinariwen. Interesting piece of trivia - I saw the guitarist Matt Sweeney (Chavez, Zwan, Bonnie Prince Billy, touring with Iggy Pop etc. etc. etc.) mention Mdou Moctar on Twitter a few times, and was about to recommend Tinariwen, only to discover that he'd played on one of their albums!
I really recommend Aza (Tamazight influence from the Atlas Mountains of Morocco). I've seen them live a bunch of times. (I attended this particular performance!)
Holy crap, I heard this guy years ago and loved his work, but then forgot his name and couldn't find him again. Thank you for bringing this music back to me!
His latest album is incredible - there are days I have Tarhatazed on a loop for an hour or two when coding (you need to be in the right frame of mind for that to work though!)
Thank you for bringing Mdou Moctar to my attention. Holy crap, that is one hell of an album, it's been on constant repeat since yesterday and I just can't stop listening!
The “Discover more artists.” / “Fans also like.” / "Related artists" (the exact name varies depending on the version and client used) feature currently is accessible via individual artist pages.
The curated playlists were mostly recommended to me on the home page in the Spotify desktop client but I suppose you could find them by simply searching for "progressive metal" in that case as well.
Anyway, here are the playlist links if you're interested in those genre playlists specifically:
I use Spotify but something I do not enjoy about their playlists is they redefine genres. I noticed that all of their house genres are filled with auto-tuned singers and cheap sounding music (chainsmokers, swedish house mafia). This isn't the kind of house that is played in clubs or is remotely reflective of the genre. You have to look for things like "housewerk" to find actual music that reflects the state of the art in this space that djs themselves enjoy listening to.
The same thing has happened with some rock genres, I've seen Spotify build playlists of pop bands who've taken the image/art of a hardcore/heavy rock band to create this really confusing situation where you are expecting a raw rock sound but you get a heavily produced pop sound.
On r/listentothis - I made a browser extension that highlights my favorite genres https://github.com/alexadam/ListenToThis-Highlight, but I have to update it because it doesn't work with the new reddit changes
SoundCloud is still my go to. Repost feed is a bunch of noise, so typically I find an artist I like and go thru his "likes" and "comment" feed to explore from there.
This is awesome, I'm a heavy Spotify user and really like to get a taste of completely new playlists and this is exactly what I hoped for. Thank you for sharing.
Funny that you should mention that song. That's of the ones I'm using to test! Another is "Angel" by Massive Attack. I think both are decent for testing lower frequencies.
I have the premium version of Spotify and have streaming quality set to the highest setting, "Very High" and I definitely notice a difference. Not sure what you mean by HQ toggle.
So far, I've compared to Qobuz and Tidal in terms of quality. Spotify beats them both in terms of interface and discovering new music.
8tracks was by far the best music discovery experience I had. Curated playlists, mostly less well known artists (or before they become popular), tagged by moods, very easy to find something you'd like to listen to at any given time. I've discovered a lot of music I like through 8tracks.
I also find human curated mood tags to be more representative than "genre" labels.
101 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 223 ms ] threadAlso, just letting youtube autoplay (which despite me never listening to Beck, always seems to take me to Beck)
- r/Music - r/trueMusic - r/listentothis - r/listentous - r/hip_hop - r/FitTunes - r/electronicmusic - 90smusic
Obviously, the above list is not exhaustive.
In my opinion, it needs a "discover" setting in autoplay where it amps up discovery and reduces chances of reaching songs I know.
Example: top rated neo-soul albums by RYM users https://rateyourmusic.com/customchart?page=1&chart_type=top&...
Note that on every album you'll find some user-made lists along the side, which can point you to more esoteric/obscure recommendations.
As for obtaining it, you can either buy it from Amazon/ebay/wherever, search Discogs marketplace or pirate it (Soulseek, RED).
If you want to spend minimal effort the suggestions by Spotify (just keep on playing, or select one of the 6 lists) can be good. Also, if you like an artist on Spotify, you see on the right some related artists.
YouTube has this feature as well, but make no mistake: YouTube Autoplay is garbage compared to Spotify's. Why? YouTube's too broad, and it spams you. For Spotify you get locked in a subset of genres based on your playlist. I share Spotify with my family (partner and daughter). We all have different preferences, and this is reflected in different lists.
Do note that Spotify saves everything you do there (as was in the news the other day). As does YouTube. If you desire privacy, use an offline solution.
I use it both for my musical releases and for finding new music across the spectrum.
The entities putting music on there are largely the ones making it, not some corporate entities that don't have time for fans... (itunes, spotify, all the other corporate rarified sales channels that require consolidators for even underground labels, and never deign to directly work with lowly artists LOL)
I like listening to their Bandcamp Weekly, a pseudo-radio show that highlights new releases. It's not as diverse as Bandcamp itself, as the DJ seems to be mostly into hybrid jazz/ambient/hiphop/world, but if you like that sort of thing, you should definitely take a listen.
I also try to go see live music as much as I can, as I often find favorite artists who are opening for the band I went to see.
Bandcamp has been awesome for this. $10 for a DRM-free album in Flac is perfect, most other services are charging double that for lossless downloads. It's a win-win that the sales go more to the artists as well.
For me the best is Radio Paradise (free eclectic radio on the internet) it's more "old" stuff than new stuff but I discovered so much quality music (and still discover new things)
Their “Discover more artists.” / “Fans also like.” feature has provided me with quite a few interesting bands I didn’t know before.
Their curated genre playlists are fantastic as well.
I mostly listen to progressive metal / progressive rock and occasionally some electronic music, too.
Their algorithms and curated content work well even for those not-exactly-mainstream genres.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5C1u_MFahhw&list=RDuvS_fSfW2...
http://azamusic.com
Holy crap, I heard this guy years ago and loved his work, but then forgot his name and couldn't find him again. Thank you for bringing this music back to me!
The curated playlists were mostly recommended to me on the home page in the Spotify desktop client but I suppose you could find them by simply searching for "progressive metal" in that case as well.
Anyway, here are the playlist links if you're interested in those genre playlists specifically:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DX5wgKYQVRARv?si=...
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DX0uqkwkR49kK?si=...
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6dkBTR6Wovn86LEDAmIKdV?si=...
The same thing has happened with some rock genres, I've seen Spotify build playlists of pop bands who've taken the image/art of a hardcore/heavy rock band to create this really confusing situation where you are expecting a raw rock sound but you get a heavily produced pop sound.
https://discoverquickly.com/
I was able to differentiate 320 mp3 to wav, but only for one song (gorillaz - clint eastwood) and I couldn't say one sounded better than the other.
I have the premium version of Spotify and have streaming quality set to the highest setting, "Very High" and I definitely notice a difference. Not sure what you mean by HQ toggle.
So far, I've compared to Qobuz and Tidal in terms of quality. Spotify beats them both in terms of interface and discovering new music.
I was also really surprised it's the lows, not the highs where I can hear it (maybe I'm just getting old...). Just a bit more punchy and clean :)
Also Spotify and YouTube.
I also find human curated mood tags to be more representative than "genre" labels.