Ask HN: How do you find new music? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you find new music?

18 points1100110017 comments

Hi folks, how do you find new music?

I find myself every year that I find less music that I like. I use a mixed method to find albums and artists. I follow various groups on social media networks (vk), read music magazines and use youtubes recommendations to pick up new stuff.

What are your tools to find new music?

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I use YouTube to find new music. Their recommendation usually knows what my music interest is. The other thing is watching a fashion show in YouTube. Some fashion shows have a nice background music. It depends on the message or story that the designer wants to tell to us. The beat could be fast or slow.

If I find the music is nice, I will try to find the music title in video description or comment. "Helpless" by Federico Martelli [0] and "Time" by Arca [1] are the examples that I love.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2b0sQmSRuc

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6-svj5HK9o

Spotify’s discover weekly and release radar playlists which are personalized. Those two playlists make the subscription worth it for me.

For specific/niche things, certain subreddits get a fair amount of posts. I suggest reverse searching links to music you enjoy instead of trying to look up a particular sub.

Hype machine and soundcloud also help a bit.

https://discoverquickly.com/ is amazing if you actively want to skip through tracks quickly (spotify based)

AllMusic has a nice monthly list of "Editor's Picks" that often have at least one or two nice albums in the haystack. That is how I discovered Big Thief, Mavis Staples' "We Get By," and some interesting indie artists. Reddit/indie and reddit/hiphopheads also have nice additions on the regular. There are some interesting music discovery tools that use a graph such as Music Map [0]

[0] https://www.music-map.com/the+civil+wars

Nowadays I mostly find new artists by: 1. Listening to Soma.fm 2. Searching Mixcloud and analyzing the playlists. 3. Checking "Recommendations" section on Discogs to find artists similar to the ones I like. 4. Checking " you may also like" section on Bandcamp. 5. Checking to record labels that released albums that I like. 6. Following blogs like "Headphone Commute", "A strangely isolated place" and "Low light mixes"

I have to second soma.fm. I almost forgot about it though, it’s been a decade at least, damn.

If you are into heavy music, the 'similar artists' on the band's page on (the awesome) Encyclopedia Metallicum is very, very good.

https://www.metal-archives.com/bands/Meshuggah/21

https://www.metal-archives.com/

The most efficient way for me, without making a job out of it, is to rely on BBC Radio 6 Music. Across the station's output, varying by show of course, there is a baked in flow of curated new music, and music new to me. Depends entirely on your preferences of course. For me in terms of novelty some highlights are shows "the freakzone" and by djs mary-anne hobbs and tom ravenscroft. Frankly, the djs do the heavy lifting and pre filter for you. On the whole I find a much higher hit rate that way than being left to my own devices.

SoundCloud - I listen to the artists that my favorite artists listen to, as well as the tracks they repost.

Spotify - Start with an artist I like, listen to all the similar suggested artists, recursively do this until I'm back to the original artist.

YouTube - same as above except with channels. Lately I've been into stoner doom metal, so 666MrDoom is the starting point. From there I listen to all the related channels.

It's a lot of manual labor but I enjoy the process and often stumble upon gems that make my skin tingle.

Find a music blog, the more independent the better, that aligns with your tastes. For me, it The Quietus [0]

Human curation is ideal, as nothing is worse than being holed into an algorithmic artistic filter bubble. Art should knock you sideways, not confirm your tastes.

[0] http://www.thequietus.com

Spotify has amazing algorithm of suggesting new music. Give it a try and you will have some new good music.

I recommend Hype Machine:

https://www.hypem.com

1) I search youtube for cover versions. I then sort the videos by number of views and I go to look at the videos with fewer than 10,000 views. Once I found someone doing covers I like I look at the other songs they cover.

2) I search youtube for "tiny desk contest"

3) Tildes has a new music group which is quite good.

4) I sub to YT channels that play sessions. EG Western AF, Gems on VHS, Little Orange Room Sessions.

5) I used to use Usenet (alt.binaries.sounds.1940s.mp, (and 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and world-music) but it's a bit frustrating to use now.

Apple Music works well plus I made my own app for finding new music https://arthtyagi.me/newmusic

List 10 or 20 of your favorite songs or albums and then go look up the producers and writers of them on discogs and see what else they have produced. I have found a lot of really good music that way

Apple Music has some playlists made by humans that are quite good ! They also have the “create a radio station” option in the song that starts playing similar songs to the song you were listening !

For me, Spotify's personalized recommendations (e.g. discover weekly, release radar) have been quite consistent in quality.

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