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Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 pay $10 a month for Youtube Premium, which gives me ad free youtube, access to Google Play Music and the Youtube Music app.

I have the family plan for $15 which I think is a great deal considering how much my family and I use Youtube.

Plus free google play music! Although its iOS app is absolute trash.

I had tons of music on google playlists and almost stopped due to ads. Firefox extensions and ad blockers have made it my go to playlist spot again.

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.

[1] - https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/

Just finished doing this with an artist I found with music-map farther up the thread.

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.

Second the ad blockers. Us humans deserve better then having ads stuffed into our media while we are enjoying it.

YouTube's 160k Opus is actually pretty good.

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".

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.

Check out "Taking You Higher" by Sheepy, changed by life.

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?

They might be unofficial uploads but YT can still find the artist and credit him.

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