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Comment by newsclues | Hacker News Reader

Music discovery is my number 1 problem with finding new music because computers made the barrier to entry so low there is now a lot of recorded crap.

Lots of the discovery algorithms seem to be paywalled, which I don’t want to do, I want to find good music for free and CHOOSE to support artists.

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I use RateYourMusic and Last.fm mostly to find out about new music:

1. RateYourMusic has a wonderful feature of democratically tagging albums with genres. People suggest this or that genre, then if it gets more than 2 votes (or something like that) the album's page is updated to feature the genre. You can then browse the genre page and swift through other similarly-tagged albums. Here's an example[1].

2. I find Last.fm's "Similar Artists" section to favor niche artists more than, say, the Spotify equivalent.

[1]: https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/casper-mcfadden/medi...

If music discovery is your number 1 music problem, why won't you pay for it?

How does software discovery seem to always be free, but music gets special treatment?

I have the same issue finding new good video games to play.

Software discovery isn’t easy either.

I kind of miss Yahoo categories and lists.

I don't think it is. Or at least not effectively. When I need a utility or have a requirement, I struggle mightily to find reliable software I can trust to fulfill that purpose. A lot of signals that would've worked 10 years ago don't anymore. Paying for software, which would be my preference, in no way guarantees that it will fit purpose, won't install Malware, Won't abuse my trust or won't be handicapped in some way. Search will lead me to slightly scammy software, and so increasingly will SEO-ed paid reviews on websites and even forums. I live the trustless Web and I hate it :-D

So for me at least, easy seamless software discovery is completely lacking.

Now, this is HN. I am sure there are number of people who will enjoy spending many hours Nd days on reddit and github sifting through opinions and source code, trying many things and then tweaking them until they get what they need. I used to be one. But that's not easy software discovery, that's hard physical labour for 99.99% of populace, including today myself :->

Whereas frankly, Spotify does ok job in building a radio station from a song or playlist. Unsolved problem is still finding a song that's alike to this song in some specific way that makes sense to me... But I expect that to be unsolved in my lifetime.

Music discovery/recommendation and really discovery/recommendation more broadly are just really hard problems. I know someone who gave a number of talks about the difficulty maybe 15 years ago (I think at SXSW among other places). [1] And it really hasn't gotten any better.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/pda/2009/mar/17/sxswi-reco...

I don’t want to pay to listen to bad music to find good music.

I want to support artists I like, but it’s hard to find them in an endless sea of crap.

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