How to discover new music | Psyche Guides
How to discover new music | Psyche Guides
In a musical rut? Whatever your age or existing tastes, you can find surprise and enjoyment beyond the streaming algorithms
We live in an era of absurd musical abundance. Streaming services put the (in)complete history of recorded music at our fingertips, with sophisticated recommendation algorithms that promise to tailor us the perfect playlist. More than 100,000 new tracks are uploaded every day to platforms like Spotify, Apple Music or SoundCloud. As the hip-hop innovator Kool Keith put it in a 2020 interview: ‘There’s so much new music out there that it’s just too much for the average antique person.’ It can be too much for any person, antique or otherwise. We’re saturated, inundated with the stuff. But the problem isn’t just abundance: it’s what we do with the musical riches at our fingertips.
So, I have a spotify playlist of about a thousand songs that are my "favorites." Of course, not everything there is amazing to me nor do I memorize the lyrics. It's just what I play when I'm bored and don't have anything in mind but I wanna listen to music.
My tip is the use youtube's algorithm. I know a lot of people here hate that algorithm and for good reason but it is absurdly good at recommending music. Literally just play an artist you like, maybe one of their more niche songs or a song that's a bit more unique and you'll start getting recommendations for very similar music. It's especially great at electronic music. I genuinely never would have found a lot of the artists I listen to without it. It would've just slipped into the void.
The community playlists on youtube music are hit-or-miss but I've legitimately discovered new music that I like on there.
For sure. YouTube also can auto generate mixes of you search for stuff enough.
While I do sometimes pick up older music, there are two issues.
a) I like having a chance to see a live performance. Now, with a ton of indie music I like, that chance tends to be low, but it’s still there.
b) If I like a band, I rarely like only one album. So I want more of that band. With old music, that chance is gone (unless the band still exists, or simply has a big backlog).In general, besides personal recommendations (or very rarely when I’m out, but they mostly just play the same ~100 songs that they’ve played 10 years ago and everyone but me seems happy with that), I mainly stick to metal review sites, not because I’m not open to listening to other things, but because there aren’t many genres (industrial rock & folk rock are probably notable exceptions, if anyone has website recommendations for new releases in that area, I’m open :D) where I’d enjoy a whole album, and I’m not a singles person. The effort of going through hundreds of albums to find one I might like is just not worth it.
edit: Just in case it wasn’t clear, I don’t use streaming services, I only buy albums, usually on bandcamp.
I use Bandcamp a lot, also, and have had some luck by checking out the label a band is associated with. Not all the artists I listen to have one, but I have found some neat music that way. Or people like you who have posted a playlist haha.
I mostly don’t care about labels. Though there’s some fun stuff at I, Voidhanger who only take really weird extreme metal bands on ;) Alas, mostly too weird for me.
This is an interesting point, and I am convinced that if there becomes an effective way of "addressing" it then all the folks saying something about "nobody makes good music anymore" will find out what they are missing.