How do you listen to / discover music?

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.

metal-archives.com

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

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.

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.

A mix of Spotify (I have a premium account there), and my own collection of CDs which I have ripped and can access via Jellyfin for higher audio quality.

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.

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

Mostly through friends, Bandcamp, sometimes BBC Radio 6. And catching random bands at festivals and liking them.

!metal@lemmy.world

Spotify is still good to me with recommendations based on what I have previously liked.

But also a lot of video memes will have bangers I seek out.

KEXP on YouTube. Best radio

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.

Minnesota public radio has some great stations. The DJs read the sponsor spots, so no traditional "commercials" with sirens and megaphones.

https://www.thecurrent.org/

After spending a year trying to go back to curating my own local library of high quality FLAC files, I just found it easier to pay for Spotify. After signing up I found at least 3 bands, one of which has become my new favorite.

My early years crate digging, than myself diggin, than Kazaa - till eventually my library is now so vast and eclectic that the Spotify algorithm does the job for me (mostly).

Though the best trick to find new music - look for your favourite band’s favourite bands. That’s honestly the fastest way to find new and interesting things.

yt music does all good and also friends

I check the overall best Album list of Rolling Stone and some genre Lists for each year. If the stuff is on Bandcamp I usually buy it after listening and liking an Album.

YT Music. For new stuff... IDK. Osmosis? I mostly listen to 80s/90s stations on the radio.

I feel like I'm out of the norm for listening to music these days, especially with the influence of tiktok on music, as I almost never listen to individual songs or playlists. I only ever listen to entire albums, one at a time. I have a massive amount of music that I'm interested in, and each day I just pick an album that I feel like listening to. For discovering music, I have three main sources; two friends who share similar music interests; youtube recommendations, and songs I just hear and then think about some time later.

How do you listen to music?

I use RiMusic. It's a YT Music fronted, look it up on F-Droid.

How do you discover music?

• Various films (especially James Gunn's)
• Wikipedia
• YT Music "For you" section and "Radio" feature

Listen: FLAC files on my android phone using Foobar2000. Or for serious listening, FLAC files on an Astell & Kern with nice headphones.

Discover: Friends, family, Bandcamp. Bandcamp is great because the bands have the option to recommend their own favourites, and if they don't, Bandcamp does the "other supporters of this band listen to this" thing. Bandcamp collections are public, so find out who paid money for an album you like and see what else they bought.

And now for the weird one: Goodwill. Not just browsing used CDs for treasures, but listen to their overhead music (especially around Halloween). There's a surprisingly good mix of random stuff playing. I've Shazam-ed more music there than anywhere else.

1-3 hour long mixed on SoundCloud. Mostly Jungle/D&B, with some house and techno for balance. Also, I've been really enjoying listening more about vocals and metal on The Charismatic Voice. (Rammstein link)

I rarely discover anything new, but I'm currently in the process of getting my entire CD and vinyl collection onto Plex - so in a way I'm rediscovering music that I liked years ago but haven't heard in ages, especially stuff that wasn't available on any streaming platforms.

It's a slow process though, especially the vinyl - I've just about finished the As, but that's one of the smallest sections! Fun though :-)

I have 125k songs in plexamp library and it's great at recommending and matching stuff I'd like. but I listen to everything.

I watch The Needle Drop on YouTube. He's a music reviewer. I don't necessarily agree with the idea of being so critical of an art form that's so subjective, but following his channel is a great way to stay up to date on noteworthy new albums coming out.

120 Minutes reruns.

For listening, it's either on Auxio on my phone (files on device over streaming), a few yt playlists that have some of my favorite songs (some downloaded, some not). That, or I have a few songs on NewPipe history that aren't saved anywhere else.

On my desktop, I use either Strawberry Music Player for my audio files and VLC for CDs (I have less than 10, but that's besides the point). Some of those CDs for some reason will just shut off after a few minutes into certain songs if I try to play it on the '92 Sony CDMan. I think it's just an issue with the CDs more than the CD player itself.

As for how I discover new music, it's usually from yt recommendations based on what I listen to, whatever catches my eyes. That or maybe it's music I find on OpenGameArt or maybe I'm looking up something like a certain vocaloid song on VocaDB or yt or on rare occasion NicoVideo and finding a cover of it or another song from the original producer.

Edit: Sony Discman, not CdMan

Used to use Spotify pretty much exclusively, and by now their algorithm is pretty good at giving me songs I like. However, Spotify as a company sucks, and also spotify's shuffle is shit (the magic shuffle or whatever they call it is even worse IMO).

Nowadays I mostly listen to mixes on YouTube and internet radio for discovering music, but I also find the occasional song on reddit. When I like something I buy it on bandcamp to support the artists I listen to.

I discover music through playing video games and watching YouTube primarily, although I want to use Bandcamp more so I can pay the artists and get higher quality files instead of doing YouTube to MP3.

I listen to music in 3 ways, I'm weird:

1. Just the normal playlist that is slowly growing with time.
2. Using Music Speed Changer to change the pitch and speed of music on my playlist, giving it a new perspective.
3. Going through my playlist, but each song has a weight assigned to it. Some are quite common and others are super rare. It creates a sense of mystery.

virtually crate digging lists in rateyourmusic, SoundCloud playlist, hours long mix videos on YouTube. if I feel in the mood for a certain genre I just do search for the aforementioned, download the whole albums if I like one song, and let it shuffle on musicbee.

Local community radio, streaming recommendations, opening acts at shows and festivals my kids and coworkers.

I listen mostly by streaming but radio here is still good because of the local not for profit station.

I make my own playlists based on checking out similar artists using Google searches of "artists like x" format and listen pretty much exclusively through those playlist as a quick collection of songs that I like, the playlists range from 2-50 hours and are either based on mood, genre or personal life events, they are ordered to preserve both the order in which I discovered the music but also so that they flow well from one song to another.

I only ever really listen on single song repeat mode, when I'm bored of the song I pick out another one, but I'll listen to the playlist as a whole to make sure it flows right.

I have a large offline collection but I've been mostly using Spotify Premium these past 6 years, the recommendations it gives at the bottom of playlists are sometimes also utilized.

I mostly listen to music at my desk on my desktop through my Beyer DT1990 with an EQ for flat frequency response or my nice wired T2 IEMs through my phone.

Sometimes I'll check out something on SoundCloud or Spotify suggestions when I post my own music to both to see what's considered related out of curiousity but it's mostly garbage, my own music included, though sometimes I stumble on something interesting from an artist who's main similarity is <10 monthly listeners.

I feel like apart from my S.O. in some aspects, I've never met anyone who interacts with music in this way, people maybe make a workout playlist at most or listen to other people's or listen only to albums haha 😂

Rollins nights on NPR

I used to use Spotify out of laziness, after a recent price hike I switched to local mp3 playback, I'm discovering music through radio, there's always something playing at work, at home, in a car, trying to diversify stations I hear, sometimes social media pops a new song in my ear

Reccomendations from friends, spotify. Whenever i doscover a new genre i tend to read the wikipedia article on it‘s history which will tell me who some of the pioneering artists of said subgenre are. What i love about spotify is i can listen to playlists for a certain genre made by other people and not the crap that spotify throws at me which are biased by my listening history.

I'm VERY old school.

OTA radio

Youtube - search for my genre(s)

Wikipedia (starting here and winding down a wiki-hole)

HardRadio

Spotify's Discover Weekly mostly. YouTube music for things like trance remixes or cover songs.

Primarily listen on Spotify. I try to expand my horizons using their discovery playlists or artist/track radio for songs I already like, but they've got me heavily pigeonholed into late 90's college rock and early/mid 00's pop-punk....which is harsh but fair.

I occasionally check out place like Bandcamp or Tapefear for some rut busters. Most recently, Bandcamp turned me on to Irish hip hop artist Denise Chaila, which was a welcome surprise.

My ways have already been discussed, except for NTS Radio, some of the best new music I've listened too were on there.

I watch music reaction youtubers. They showcase a large amount of new music in a short amount of time and are kind of like DJs where they preselect good stuff already.