Eww. Unless you can find yourself an independent station that actually plays something outside of the top-pops, please, please, count me out.
In every Uber and/or cab I end up taking, I ask them to turn the FM radio off.
The jazz and classical stations are okay, but then the commercials completely ruin the listening experience - especially for 'chill out' genres like the above.
Word of mouth from friends - Spotify or Apple Music playlists, these are great ways to find new music. What's on popular radio stations generally just annoys my friends and I.
Between the terrible selection of music, spotty audio quality, and ads, there's never been a worse time to pick radio.
For French speakers, France Inter has a great playlist without ads when they are on strike. When it's not the strike season or if you have more precise tastes, FIP is nice too.
A number of low power radio stations came online after the 2013 application window with the FCC. These are hyper local and often very diverse and essentially equivalent to word of mouth. My city has more than one, they cover the city limits and some of the suburbs. One in particular is full of music nerds playing their own niches for an hour or two every week. I do a show myself :)
89.3 The Current -- based out of Minneapolis -- has a great selection. Totally independent. Not all the DJs play the same music, which is a double-edged sword, but you can count on healthy variety of new and old and many genres.
I used to listen to Radio Paradise some years ago, had forgotten about it. They are really good. This is kind of interesting:
"Radio Paradise got its start in Paradise, California (hence the name...). Paradise is a peaceful little town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, far from the big city stress & turmoil. Our goal is to bring a little Paradise into your life, wherever you're located."
I first heard of Paradise from this station, and considered moving there a few years ago to be closer to my daughter in nearby Chico. A bit over a year ago Paradise was tragically hit by a huge wildfire nearly wiped the town off the map and reduced the population by 90%. It sounds like Radio Paradise moved away before the fire, since they still imply that Paradise is stress free, etc. ... I don't see a single mention of the fire on the site. That seems really odd to me.
I'm surprised this article doesn't mention youtube, which is a major way of finding new music for me.
Not only can I find new music through videos that youtube selects as related to ones I like, but listening to playlists that contain music that I like is another great way to find new music, and so is listening through the other music posted by people who post music that I like. And then, of course, one always has the option to search for favorite genres and artists, which should turn up a bunch of new music.
Listening through Soundcloud's playlists is another possibility, though Soundcloud's discoverability has really suffered since they got rid of groups.
Then there are genre-specific subreddits, like r/psybient, r/EBM, r/industrialmusic, etc.
Connecting with people with similar tastes is probably the best way, though.
But YouTube's quality is such hot garbage, and the ads, oh, God, the ads.
Nothing ruins the experience of a perfectly good album like Miles Davis' 'Kind of Blue' more than a jump from cool jazz to an ad for Grammarly that's a full 5-10db louder than what I was listening to.
If YouTube's audio quality was worth listening to, YouTube Premium might be a thing, but Spotify and Apple Music have it down to a science, and, similarly, have fantastic recommendation engines.
Next to radio, YouTube is certainly the poorest quality experience for listening to music in the current era of options.
I keep a family plan for both Apple Music and Spotify to literally just share with my best friends so they won't default to listening to music on YouTube while we're hanging out.
I've collected CD's and vinyl for 15 years, and spent very little time listening to radio - the jarring advertising, especially between tracks on an album, drives me mad as a musician, listener, and producer.
I just use youtube-dl[1] and never see a single ad.
Also, downloading videos with youtube-dl lets me archive them for myself, which is useful insurance against when (as all too often happens) the video gets pulled from youtube for some reason.
As for quality, this thread is about discovery, where quality shouldn't really matter. But if quality matters a lot to you, after you discover some music that you like, you can go to bandcamp and buy a FLAC of the tracks you like from the artist. Or you can go to whatever other music service that you think has better quality and get them there.
I save music I like to a playlist in YouTube, then have YouTube-dl set up with a configuration script to download the audio from everything in those playlists to a Dropbox directory. Then I can listen to it via the Dropbox app audio player (kind of a piece of shit) on my iPhone. There is a small python script to tidy some of the file naming too. But it all boils down to running a .bat file now and then.
I strongly encourage people to block ads. Ublock Origin is free and extremely simple to use, and it will get rid of all of the pre-roll advertising you see on Youtube.
IMO the only reason at this point for anyone of any technical level not to be running an adblocker is if they have some kind of ethical objection to blocking ads in general. And even in that case, I encourage people to leave their adblocker enabled on Youtube and just pay for Youtube Premium on the side.
One thing I try to get across to people is that pervasive advertising has harmful side-effects that are difficult to see when you're used to that state. I started universally blocking ads on the web, in media, in apps; I got really aggressive about blocking unwanted content. And I very quickly noticed a change in how long I could focus on content, how quickly I absorbed information, how much effort it was to consume things or interact with things.
It was noticeable enough that I don't think of advertising as free anymore -- you're paying a real cost in mental ability, in your energy. Ads have an effect on your psyche, on how you see the world. I don't think it's healthy.
I have also had really good luck finding music on youtube, especially independent house/electronic music. The youtube recommendation algorithm was really good for music until a few months ago. Not sure what they changed, but I'm seeing the same videos pop up over and over, and those videos are more "mainstream" as well.
People rag on youtube, but I've found so much amazing content on there just by searching around and choosing the next video from the recommended ones so that you go deeper into the rabbit hole.
Youtube's recommendations seems to go through phases, and it depends entirely on the device I use to watch it.
On PC I get one lot of content, on mobile another, and on my Smart TV yet another, despite being signed into the same account everywhere.
The best way I've found to find new music is actually on their app for my Smart TV . Unfortunately the Youtube leanback/tv mode for the PC seems to have disappeared, so it's hard to show how different it is.
It'll show me the same stuff over again, and then randomly every few months it's like "Oh, here's a whole heap of stuff you've never seen before, that's been on the platform for years".
Isn't the stuff on YT mostly unofficial uploads where the artist doesn't benefit, whereas with e.g. Spotify at least a couple of pennies (though very little still) are paid to them?
I agree with Youtube, more specifically, channels that focus on bringing attention to new music.
MrSuicideSheep has got to be the most successful instances of this, but there are hundreds more and if you find the right ones for your taste this can be a great source of new music.
The recommendations on the other hand have been so useless that I have been hiding them along with comments for a while now.
Word of mouth from friends is number one. As a DJ, I used to live by this. I wouldn't go hunting on BeatPort, I'd just find what friends were listening to and try to explore from there. 90% of the time it went awesome.
Other than that - Spotify and Apple Music both, at this time, have excellent playlists and recommendations - as far as I've found, in my extensive use of both platforms.
I prefer Apple Music, for no particular reason other than I've been using the iTunes/iPod ecosystem since 2004-5, and thusly my library contains all the music I've already ripped/downloaded.
Spotify's (non-algorithmic) New Music Friday, (algorithmic) Release Radar and Discover Weekly playlists have all been amazing for finding music for me.
I had found their best offerings to be their end of year wrap-ups: “The Ones that Got Away” in 2017 and “Tastebreakers” in 2018, and was disappointed they chose to end 2019 with “Music of the decade”, which was all songs I already knew.
Agreed. Their charts are a good way to find recommendations, especially if you filter by particular genres you like. Also good is to look at lists by users who like something you like.
daily.bandcamp and their weekly radio show is pretty huge for my discovery along with a mishmash of npr, kexp, bleep, reddit, brooklyn vegan and nts radio
It hit a software filter because of past activities by spammers or trolls. I've cleared that now so it won't happen again.
Please don't post like this in the threads. If you have a question or see a problem, send it to us at hn@ycombinator.com, as the site guidelines ask (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) so we can answer you and fix the issue. If you post to the thread instead, you not only add off-topic noise, the odds are high that we won't see your comment and so can't do anything about it. I only saw this one at random.
OP: have you ever tried Spotify's weekly Discover playlist? I can't believe how good it's been for me, and I never took to Pandora or similar recommendation methods. Discover has opened me up to bands that were always on the perimeter of my tastes but that I never took the plunge to listen to, and I'm amazed at how Spotify even knows to recommend a deep cut that I'll love from an artist I typically hate. Spotify has 9 or 10 years of Premium listening data from me at this point, and for me they are using it well.
I have had exactly the opposite experience. I have been pigeonholed for the past 2 years and counting. The structure of my playlists lately have been 25 songs that I've already heard a thousand times in previous Discover Weeklys or Daily Mixes, then 3 songs I haven't heard in a while from artists I know, then 2 actually interesting tracks. The heyday of Discover Weekly for me was 2016.
I've heard that they rely much more on which artists you "follow" rather than your listening behavior and saved songs. But I have no idea if this is true. I'm having trouble explaining it and subsequently have lost faith in the platform.
I think this could be due to genre bias. There's a new xanax rapper every 60 seconds but fewer folk metal, and the like, partially due to required number of people and overall effort.
I really like Bandcamp's articles. They're hyping material on their own platform of course, but you can give it a quick listen on-the-spot, and if you like it, that's a win for you, the artist, and Bandcamp. If you don't like it, you can move on to the next article straightaway. Moreover it's often stuff that no algorithm would have recommended to you.
When I was growing up, MySpace was one of my favourite sources. Sadly, they lost their entire collection in a botched server migration. In April 2019, the MySpace Dragon Hoard was uploaded to the Internet Archive.
I gathered all the metadata, added all the songs to an iTunes 10.6.3 library, and made smart playlists based on genre, location and (assumed) language.
That's helping me find unknown bands from far away, who I would never have heard of otherwise.
Personally I'm into rock (all kinds: punk, metal, Christian), though the Dragon Hoard also has pop, rap, dance, etc. Listening through everything is taking a very long time, and most of the music honestly sucks. But when I do find something good (e.g. The Dolls, Ritalinn) then it's very indie, and good for learning a new language!
Message me if you'd like more details, and/or have a good idea how to share the content safely.
Another project I'd love to see is to group bands based on friends' Likes, which I've scraped from Facebook. There must be a way to visualise clusters of bands who many of the same friends all like, though I'm not sure how best to do that.
BBC 6 Music. Man, does that station ever have its finger on the pulse. You have to be kind of ready for anything, and it's not always easy listening, but you often get pure gold. Not uncommonly, it'll be music that isn't even released yet, or maybe only exists on the artist's Soundcloud page. As a bonus, quite a few of its DJs are famous people who you didn't know are really into some musical niche.
On the other hand, my friend-who-consistently-finds-cool-music pretty much only listens to Soundcloud, and whatever it recommends. It seems to be the most popular platform these days for a certain type of eclectic artist.
Came here to say 6Music too. It's an absolute goldmine and I've discovered some great stuff on there (Nils Frahm, Hannah Peel, Anna Meridith, Erland Cooper, Big Thief). I'm more into contemporary instrumental stuff these days but enjoy other genres, too.
I usually listen to Mary-Anne Hobbs, Tom Ravenscroft, Guy Garvey, Cillian Murphy whenever he's on. Which DJs do you recommend on there?
I am in the very fortunate position that despite living way out in the boonies, I have a proper, brick-and-mortar record store of the High Fidelity kind within an hour's travel from home. Both the guys running it have an encyclopedic knowledge of a number of genres, and there's always a few customers browsing the shelves which will merrily question you about your preferences, before veering off on a tangent, getting into a heated argument with the other patrons and the owner as to what record will be the right one for me, we'll put the winning selection on, eager, anticipating eyes on me as the first chords fill the store, awaiting my reaction...
I love that place.
Point is - while Spotify's algorithms are brilliant at determining what music I might like based on similar music I've listened to in the past, I find there's no substitute for enthusiastic, knowledgeable fans.
I remember in my early twenties there was a drug store with a music part in the town I lived in. The guy running that division was a DJ for different genres. And an wide ranging knowledge and thirst for new stuff. The more he got to know me the better his recommendations got. They were all on the edge and sometimes slightly over the edge.
lots of the stuff I got to know back then I still like to listen to.
I didn't have that much money to spare. Non the less he brought CD after CD to listen to on the players there. sometimes I stayed for 3 to 4 hours just enjoying the music. whenever I had some money to spare I took home a knew jewel of music.
Anyone remember back on what.cd the related artists "web" system? That was my favorite way to find music, and since the site's demise, I have yet to find a comparable way of discovering similar artists.
Luckily back then, I started following many of my favorite artists and labels on social media, which sort of created a new wave of recommendations based on what those artists are talking about. It works, but it's not the same as that magical "web" of suggestions.
win96@H+ mail.ch ; switch chem abbreviation for the subatomic particle it represents. https://github.com/WhatCD/Gazelle I'm wondering how they make their similar artist connections, tried looking through the code but only found code pulling from a DB rather than how they generate the db.
I miss reading the 100 page threads on What.CD about which of the 40 different rips of the White Album was best. Alternatives have popped up, but it saddens me that we lost all of that collective comment history.
I was part of What.CD (and its successors), but if I'm wondering which edition to snatch, I usually search the Steve Hoffman forums [1] and look up the Dynamic Range DB [2].
Interesting. I have never seen that happen and can not reproduce it. Anything special about the browser you use? Feel free to shoot me an email then we can figure it out.
Redacted has filled the gap. Orpheus too. Though maybe the webs aren't as fully developed as WCD's came to be, these sites are definitely maturing in the same way.
Every Noise At Once [1] has a nice web of genres and artists to check out.
From their description: Every Noise at Once is an ongoing attempt at an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 3,883 genre-shaped distinctions by Spotify as of 2020-01-30. The calibration is fuzzy, but in general down is more organic, up is more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier.
I came here to say this. It takes a few minutes to understand what you're looking at, but once you dig in, it's a phenomenal way to discover new music. The auto-generated Spotify lists linked from the top are awesome.
Freeleech was one of my favorite ways to discover new music on What.cd even with a buffer well built I'd go for it anyway just to see if I could find something new I liked.
Yep. Can't replace the passion of music lovers. I posted elsewhere in the thread about finding new favorite music just on a whim when it happens to be freeleech.
I remember what.cd to be a mythical amazing website with impossible to find invite and then close to impossible to maintain ratio starting from 0. Never got an invite and had to use more sane trackers for finding new music, last.fm recommendations and finding soundtracks for watched video clips/movies etc.
Other than the stuff already mentioned (subreddits, blogs, playlists, word of mouth) I discover a ton of music via human-programmed streaming "radio".
I know it's not as big a thing as it was in the mid-late 2000's but there are still thousands of Shoutcast/Icecast/etc. stations and many of them are programmed by DJs, music enthusiasts, and fans. A good set of bookmarks is like having a radio dial filled with 10 or 20 college radio stations (or whatever analogue you would consider to be the ideal type of radio for your tastes.)
I've been listening to streaming radio since the early 2000's and one of the main reasons I bought my first smartphone (Palm Treo!) was because I could install a Winamp clone and listen in the car, on headphones, or wherever I was. I still do this today--albeit on a slightly nicer phone.
Ironically, very little of the conversation in this thread is discussing the actual link, which is a mailing list of human-reviewed releases.
Most of the comments appear to be about the best algorithmic recommendation engine. I've used them all and still think it doesn't compare to the experience of human-curated music. Even a 1 paragraph review of the record tells me more than a "You might also like [___]" message.
Same here, in fact at least 90% of my new music comes from online radio. 90% of that comes from dandelionradio.com. What other streaming radio stations would you recommend?
This stuff tends to vary greatly depending on individual tastes and preferences.
That said, some of the ones I like are
- SomaFM (mentioned in these replies already I think)
- KEXP (an actual broadcast station, but I listen online: https://kexp.org)
- Devil's Night Radio (this was taken down and they regrouped under the name KPJK. I only have the link to listen on TuneIn but it's essentially described as "the best dive bar jukebox" with a mix of punk, garage, oldies, rock, sad cowboy songs, and assorted weird stuff. https://tunein.com/radio/KPJK-s263142/)
I've been a DJ/record collector for two decades, run a vinyl marketplace[0], have subscriptions to several streaming sites, and I still get so bored of my own taste and what the algorithms give me. The radio has again become a bit part of my listening in the last few years.
Personal favourites are UK's BBC 6 Music, and a small Lisbon-based station called Oxygenio[1]
As a music enthusiast and collector myself I'm familiar with that feeling as well as the disappointing state of recommendation engines.
However I think it's easy to fall into a habit/routine of constantly looking for and acquiring new (to me) releases when it actually may be a good idea to take a step back, rediscover the collection you already have and go back to passively stumbling upon hidden gems rather than actively seeking them out in a Discogs dive with a few dozen open tabs.
Radio, like NTS[0] as well as the mixes of other curators/DJs have indeed been a great source of inspiration for a more relaxed approach to discovery.
These days I find tons of new music through https://daily.bandcamp.com/ . No blinders, you'll get hip-hop, then doom metal, then Philippines traditional music. I like this much more than recommendation engines that only make little circles around what you know.
And buying music on Bandcamp, musicians get a fairer share than they do on big platforms.
This is a terrible guide that ignores the best algorithmic recommendations that spotify provides, the "Related Artist" feature from the artist page. If you are a life long music explorer, why didn't you mention the last.fm Similar Artist feature? Concert reminder services like songkick are great for learning which bands are touring with your favorite artists, too, in addition to suggesting artists based on your current likes. This is low effort.
Spotify's algorithmic recommendations aren't very good. I use Spotify, but always build my playlists by hand, after finding music elsewhere. Typically that's Youtube, but I also follow the artists I like on twitter and get new songs from them.
I don't think Spotify has any good features for finding new artists. I've used all of the ones you mentioned and generally don't like the playlists. Usually they play songs I already know, and the new ones they introduce I just skip. I get a very small hit rate of new music to listen to from Spotify versus other channels.
I think I found your problem. My Discover Weekly is always filled with great new artists I've never heard of, and there's generally at least 3-6 songs that I think are great (and want to explore the artist further). Note that I listened to roughly ~80,000 minutes of music last year (according to Spotify wrapped) with 7,600 songs played, so it wasn't a small amount.
I worked full-time on algorithmic music recommendation for about 5 months last year[1] (started working on it as a side project in 2016). I've always thought that, ultimately, an algorithm should be the best--after all, you can have it use human-curated data as an input. While my algorithm isn't amazing, it works far better for me than Spotify or Pandora ever did, so I've been using it myself regularly. I pivoted to a general-purpose recommender system idea[2] last november, but I'd love to go back and work more on music later on.
(Music was just too hard to get started in--I spent far more time trying to find a way to integrate my algorithm into playback sources than actually working on the algorithm)
Having conversations about music with people is half the fun in my mind. It’s a creative medium so talking to people that have unexpected associations leads to lots of wonderful surprises in discovering new music. Also having context is also a huge part of deriving pleasure from a piece.
Algorithms that feed you stuff that all sounds similar is great if you need background music while you do chores or studying, etc. but for when you are listening to stuff more actively conversations with people is essential in my mind.
If you care about music, find human creators and curators (record labels, well-run stores, reviewers, DJs, etc) you like and pay attention to what they're doing. Talk to them, even. There are likely some of these people within a degree or two of you socially.
Use algorithms only if you're at a complete loss and need a bit of help serendipitously stumbling onto any of the above, but don't rely on them.
Here's how you find new music: peer to peer. Soulseek is what I recommend. The value is unlocked when you search for something relatively niche. You'll find users that have what you're looking for and can then browse their shared directory and download other stuff that you haven't heard of but appears interesting. If you like what you find, buy it. P2P is life.
My extremely modern recommendation for those feeling like they have no good sources: have y'all tried reading more blogs?
I still read Stereogum (which recently went independent again after being owned by Billboard) and Pitchfork. I stay reasonably on top of popular music with them - Stereogum in particular strikes an amazing balance between having good coverage of straight-up pop while still giving coverage to often-ignored genres like hardcore and grime. Their writers certainly have their blindspots, and they are driven by popular label press releases as much honest discovery, but that's kind of why I read them - I want to stay on top of the zeitgeist.
I think if you have specific tastes, you should find sources covering your niches. I also think that if you live in a major city, you may want to find local coverage - I read Brooklyn Vegan, which is (unsurprisingly given the name) also mainly focused on mainstream indie, also but covers a lot of smaller artists who are coming through NYC soon. I've managed to see a lot of live music I never would have heard of thanks to them.
I am also interested in working on better ways to discover music. I've been working on a small Twitter-like social network for sharing new music on and off for the past few years, somewhat comparable to This Is My Jam. It doesn't do any fancy algorithms or anything, it just presents music your friends post in a form that's easy to listen back to (via Spotify and Apple Music SDKs - would love to have more sources someday, but Soundcloud and Bandcamp don't really have APIs for this, and obviously hosting content is a minefield). I'm watching the comments on this thread closely for inspiration on this - right now I've just been using it with a couple friends and thinking about how it might expand in the future :)
My admittedly old-school way of finding new music is the following:
1) Put a link to my last.fm profile in my forum signature.
2) Ask people to review what I listen to and make recommendations.
This has been infinitely more useful than the standard machine-generated recommendations, particularly when it comes to specific sub-genres and the like. A human who sees I have Black Sabbath, Sleep, and Pentagram in my rotations but not Pantera, Korn, or Slipknot in my list is probably going to implicitly understand that I don't like nu-metal, and will recommend something within the traditional heavy metal or doom metal genres.
The machine algorithms, on the other hand, think it's all just "heavy metal", and will then send me bogus recommendations for Marilyn Manson and other crap that I'm never going to touch.
267 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 327 ms ] threadIn every Uber and/or cab I end up taking, I ask them to turn the FM radio off.
The jazz and classical stations are okay, but then the commercials completely ruin the listening experience - especially for 'chill out' genres like the above.
Word of mouth from friends - Spotify or Apple Music playlists, these are great ways to find new music. What's on popular radio stations generally just annoys my friends and I.
Between the terrible selection of music, spotty audio quality, and ads, there's never been a worse time to pick radio.
https://www.thecurrent.org/
You can also find it on I <3 Radio.
"Radio Paradise got its start in Paradise, California (hence the name...). Paradise is a peaceful little town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, far from the big city stress & turmoil. Our goal is to bring a little Paradise into your life, wherever you're located."
I first heard of Paradise from this station, and considered moving there a few years ago to be closer to my daughter in nearby Chico. A bit over a year ago Paradise was tragically hit by a huge wildfire nearly wiped the town off the map and reduced the population by 90%. It sounds like Radio Paradise moved away before the fire, since they still imply that Paradise is stress free, etc. ... I don't see a single mention of the fire on the site. That seems really odd to me.
Not only can I find new music through videos that youtube selects as related to ones I like, but listening to playlists that contain music that I like is another great way to find new music, and so is listening through the other music posted by people who post music that I like. And then, of course, one always has the option to search for favorite genres and artists, which should turn up a bunch of new music.
Listening through Soundcloud's playlists is another possibility, though Soundcloud's discoverability has really suffered since they got rid of groups.
Then there are genre-specific subreddits, like r/psybient, r/EBM, r/industrialmusic, etc.
Connecting with people with similar tastes is probably the best way, though.
Nothing ruins the experience of a perfectly good album like Miles Davis' 'Kind of Blue' more than a jump from cool jazz to an ad for Grammarly that's a full 5-10db louder than what I was listening to.
If YouTube's audio quality was worth listening to, YouTube Premium might be a thing, but Spotify and Apple Music have it down to a science, and, similarly, have fantastic recommendation engines.
Next to radio, YouTube is certainly the poorest quality experience for listening to music in the current era of options.
I keep a family plan for both Apple Music and Spotify to literally just share with my best friends so they won't default to listening to music on YouTube while we're hanging out.
I've collected CD's and vinyl for 15 years, and spent very little time listening to radio - the jarring advertising, especially between tracks on an album, drives me mad as a musician, listener, and producer.
Plus free google play music! Although its iOS app is absolute trash.
Also, downloading videos with youtube-dl lets me archive them for myself, which is useful insurance against when (as all too often happens) the video gets pulled from youtube for some reason.
As for quality, this thread is about discovery, where quality shouldn't really matter. But if quality matters a lot to you, after you discover some music that you like, you can go to bandcamp and buy a FLAC of the tracks you like from the artist. Or you can go to whatever other music service that you think has better quality and get them there.
[1] - https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/
IMO the only reason at this point for anyone of any technical level not to be running an adblocker is if they have some kind of ethical objection to blocking ads in general. And even in that case, I encourage people to leave their adblocker enabled on Youtube and just pay for Youtube Premium on the side.
One thing I try to get across to people is that pervasive advertising has harmful side-effects that are difficult to see when you're used to that state. I started universally blocking ads on the web, in media, in apps; I got really aggressive about blocking unwanted content. And I very quickly noticed a change in how long I could focus on content, how quickly I absorbed information, how much effort it was to consume things or interact with things.
It was noticeable enough that I don't think of advertising as free anymore -- you're paying a real cost in mental ability, in your energy. Ads have an effect on your psyche, on how you see the world. I don't think it's healthy.
People rag on youtube, but I've found so much amazing content on there just by searching around and choosing the next video from the recommended ones so that you go deeper into the rabbit hole.
On PC I get one lot of content, on mobile another, and on my Smart TV yet another, despite being signed into the same account everywhere.
The best way I've found to find new music is actually on their app for my Smart TV . Unfortunately the Youtube leanback/tv mode for the PC seems to have disappeared, so it's hard to show how different it is.
It'll show me the same stuff over again, and then randomly every few months it's like "Oh, here's a whole heap of stuff you've never seen before, that's been on the platform for years".
MrSuicideSheep has got to be the most successful instances of this, but there are hundreds more and if you find the right ones for your taste this can be a great source of new music.
The recommendations on the other hand have been so useless that I have been hiding them along with comments for a while now.
Other than that - Spotify and Apple Music both, at this time, have excellent playlists and recommendations - as far as I've found, in my extensive use of both platforms.
I prefer Apple Music, for no particular reason other than I've been using the iTunes/iPod ecosystem since 2004-5, and thusly my library contains all the music I've already ripped/downloaded.
Please don't post like this in the threads. If you have a question or see a problem, send it to us at hn@ycombinator.com, as the site guidelines ask (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) so we can answer you and fix the issue. If you post to the thread instead, you not only add off-topic noise, the odds are high that we won't see your comment and so can't do anything about it. I only saw this one at random.
I've detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22194518.
I've heard that they rely much more on which artists you "follow" rather than your listening behavior and saved songs. But I have no idea if this is true. I'm having trouble explaining it and subsequently have lost faith in the platform.
I gathered all the metadata, added all the songs to an iTunes 10.6.3 library, and made smart playlists based on genre, location and (assumed) language.
That's helping me find unknown bands from far away, who I would never have heard of otherwise.
Personally I'm into rock (all kinds: punk, metal, Christian), though the Dragon Hoard also has pop, rap, dance, etc. Listening through everything is taking a very long time, and most of the music honestly sucks. But when I do find something good (e.g. The Dolls, Ritalinn) then it's very indie, and good for learning a new language!
Message me if you'd like more details, and/or have a good idea how to share the content safely.
Another project I'd love to see is to group bands based on friends' Likes, which I've scraped from Facebook. There must be a way to visualise clusters of bands who many of the same friends all like, though I'm not sure how best to do that.
On the other hand, my friend-who-consistently-finds-cool-music pretty much only listens to Soundcloud, and whatever it recommends. It seems to be the most popular platform these days for a certain type of eclectic artist.
I usually listen to Mary-Anne Hobbs, Tom Ravenscroft, Guy Garvey, Cillian Murphy whenever he's on. Which DJs do you recommend on there?
I love that place.
Point is - while Spotify's algorithms are brilliant at determining what music I might like based on similar music I've listened to in the past, I find there's no substitute for enthusiastic, knowledgeable fans.
lots of the stuff I got to know back then I still like to listen to.
I didn't have that much money to spare. Non the less he brought CD after CD to listen to on the players there. sometimes I stayed for 3 to 4 hours just enjoying the music. whenever I had some money to spare I took home a knew jewel of music.
Luckily back then, I started following many of my favorite artists and labels on social media, which sort of created a new wave of recommendations based on what those artists are talking about. It works, but it's not the same as that magical "web" of suggestions.
Linked above but in case you don't see, have a look at https://rippy.site
[1] https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/forums/music-corner.2/
[2] http://dr.loudness-war.info/
I have never seen (or heard about) the what.cd related artists web.
Let me see if I can find a video or images about it...
http://www.gnoosic.com/vote_save.php?pstVote=add&pstItem=cv+...
https://interviewfor.red/en/index.html
From their description: Every Noise at Once is an ongoing attempt at an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 3,883 genre-shaped distinctions by Spotify as of 2020-01-30. The calibration is fuzzy, but in general down is more organic, up is more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier.
[1]http://everynoise.com/
I know it's not as big a thing as it was in the mid-late 2000's but there are still thousands of Shoutcast/Icecast/etc. stations and many of them are programmed by DJs, music enthusiasts, and fans. A good set of bookmarks is like having a radio dial filled with 10 or 20 college radio stations (or whatever analogue you would consider to be the ideal type of radio for your tastes.)
I've been listening to streaming radio since the early 2000's and one of the main reasons I bought my first smartphone (Palm Treo!) was because I could install a Winamp clone and listen in the car, on headphones, or wherever I was. I still do this today--albeit on a slightly nicer phone.
Most of the comments appear to be about the best algorithmic recommendation engine. I've used them all and still think it doesn't compare to the experience of human-curated music. Even a 1 paragraph review of the record tells me more than a "You might also like [___]" message.
That said, some of the ones I like are
- SomaFM (mentioned in these replies already I think)
- KEXP (an actual broadcast station, but I listen online: https://kexp.org)
- Devil's Night Radio (this was taken down and they regrouped under the name KPJK. I only have the link to listen on TuneIn but it's essentially described as "the best dive bar jukebox" with a mix of punk, garage, oldies, rock, sad cowboy songs, and assorted weird stuff. https://tunein.com/radio/KPJK-s263142/)
Personal favourites are UK's BBC 6 Music, and a small Lisbon-based station called Oxygenio[1]
[0]https://www.soundshelter.net
[1]https://www.radio.net/s/oxigenio
However I think it's easy to fall into a habit/routine of constantly looking for and acquiring new (to me) releases when it actually may be a good idea to take a step back, rediscover the collection you already have and go back to passively stumbling upon hidden gems rather than actively seeking them out in a Discogs dive with a few dozen open tabs.
Radio, like NTS[0] as well as the mixes of other curators/DJs have indeed been a great source of inspiration for a more relaxed approach to discovery.
[0] https://www.nts.live/
And buying music on Bandcamp, musicians get a fairer share than they do on big platforms.
edit: possible answers might be "Artist Radio", "my Discover Weekly playlist", "Related Artists page", "my Daily Mix playlists"
I think I found your problem. My Discover Weekly is always filled with great new artists I've never heard of, and there's generally at least 3-6 songs that I think are great (and want to explore the artist further). Note that I listened to roughly ~80,000 minutes of music last year (according to Spotify wrapped) with 7,600 songs played, so it wasn't a small amount.
I worked full-time on algorithmic music recommendation for about 5 months last year[1] (started working on it as a side project in 2016). I've always thought that, ultimately, an algorithm should be the best--after all, you can have it use human-curated data as an input. While my algorithm isn't amazing, it works far better for me than Spotify or Pandora ever did, so I've been using it myself regularly. I pivoted to a general-purpose recommender system idea[2] last november, but I'd love to go back and work more on music later on.
(Music was just too hard to get started in--I spent far more time trying to find a way to integrate my algorithm into playback sources than actually working on the algorithm)
[1] https://lagukan.com
[2] https://findka.com
Algorithms that feed you stuff that all sounds similar is great if you need background music while you do chores or studying, etc. but for when you are listening to stuff more actively conversations with people is essential in my mind.
Use algorithms only if you're at a complete loss and need a bit of help serendipitously stumbling onto any of the above, but don't rely on them.
I still read Stereogum (which recently went independent again after being owned by Billboard) and Pitchfork. I stay reasonably on top of popular music with them - Stereogum in particular strikes an amazing balance between having good coverage of straight-up pop while still giving coverage to often-ignored genres like hardcore and grime. Their writers certainly have their blindspots, and they are driven by popular label press releases as much honest discovery, but that's kind of why I read them - I want to stay on top of the zeitgeist.
I think if you have specific tastes, you should find sources covering your niches. I also think that if you live in a major city, you may want to find local coverage - I read Brooklyn Vegan, which is (unsurprisingly given the name) also mainly focused on mainstream indie, also but covers a lot of smaller artists who are coming through NYC soon. I've managed to see a lot of live music I never would have heard of thanks to them.
I am also interested in working on better ways to discover music. I've been working on a small Twitter-like social network for sharing new music on and off for the past few years, somewhat comparable to This Is My Jam. It doesn't do any fancy algorithms or anything, it just presents music your friends post in a form that's easy to listen back to (via Spotify and Apple Music SDKs - would love to have more sources someday, but Soundcloud and Bandcamp don't really have APIs for this, and obviously hosting content is a minefield). I'm watching the comments on this thread closely for inspiration on this - right now I've just been using it with a couple friends and thinking about how it might expand in the future :)
1) Put a link to my last.fm profile in my forum signature.
2) Ask people to review what I listen to and make recommendations.
This has been infinitely more useful than the standard machine-generated recommendations, particularly when it comes to specific sub-genres and the like. A human who sees I have Black Sabbath, Sleep, and Pentagram in my rotations but not Pantera, Korn, or Slipknot in my list is probably going to implicitly understand that I don't like nu-metal, and will recommend something within the traditional heavy metal or doom metal genres.
The machine algorithms, on the other hand, think it's all just "heavy metal", and will then send me bogus recommendations for Marilyn Manson and other crap that I'm never going to touch.