My listening style basically comes down to vibe, e.g. "I want to imagine myself as a jaded ex-con planning my next heist" and "I'm duking it out with an aggressively hegemonizing von Neumann swarm in the asteroid belt"
I landed up going back to college/community radio for true discovery (i.e. you'll find stuff you hate AND stuff that you love from genres that you didn't know existed). I use Bandcamp to find/buy new music in genres I love and know well.
For people reading this who are interested in trying this out, these are the stations that I listen to:
- KEXP (Seattle, WA/Bay Area)
- KTRU (Houston, TX) <-- home station
- KPFT (Houston, TX) <-- home station
- WMSE (Milwaukee, WI)
- WYEP (Pittsburgh, PA)
- KVNO (Omaha, NE) <-- classical
- KCSM (San Mateo Area) <-- jazz
- SomaFM Indie Pop Rocks!
- SomaFM Metal Detector
You can also try scanning the lower end of your radio dial (under 93 MHz), as this is usually spectrum that's reserved for community and college radio stations. Some college stations still broadcast in AM, though this, and AM radio writ large, is dying out.
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While I'm on this soapbox: Apple Music's shuffle absolutely biases towards bigger/more popular artists.
I once had a few (like, between 10 and 20) Taylor Swift songs in my library in a 2000+ song playlist I used to shuffle in the mornings. I don't listen to her very often, and I didn't have any of her albums in my library at the time.
EVERY SINGLE TIME I'd shuffle all of the songs in this playlist or my library, Taylor Swift would get queued up way more than she should have given my listening history. I removed all of her songs from my library to get it to stop.
I get much more variety when I shuffle all of my _downloaded_ songs (which, I believe, is everything in my library).
Here are my two stations that I listen to:
- WBER https://wber.org
- WITR https://witr.rit.edu
> The FCC policy covering broadcasting stations limits them to call signs that start with a "K" or a "W", with "K" call signs generally reserved for stations west of the Mississippi River, and "W" limited to stations east of the river.
For as long as I can remember, last.fm has had the ability to show you similar artists when given any one particular artist. And it's remarkably good, in my opinion.
With it, I've discovered so much great music that I'd have never stumbled upon organically.
It's also totally free to browse and without signing up. For example, browse artists similar to Jean Knight: https://www.last.fm/music/Jean+Knight (scroll down to "Similar Artists", or just tack on /+similar to the URL)
I can recommend everyone this video by Rick Beato: The Real Reason Why Music Is Getting Worse
Music is too easy to make? So people like producers and record executives don't have the power they used to. That's a good thing. The history of music proves this.
Music is too easy to consume? I legit don't know how to respond to this. Just because music isn't part of kids' identities anymore doesn't mean that's because it's too easy to consume. Times change, Rick. Whereas they used to share music now they share streamers and YouTubers.
The main argument that derails Rick here is in the first few minutes. He claims that music all sounds the same because of the tools available. He claims that music sounds the same because someone is comfortable with sounds that are familiar. He doesn't really say whether it's record companies or artists or consumers. Just some nebulous 'they'.
It's always been like that. Always. When a band gets popular, other bands pop up just like them to try to steal their popularity and money (Fats Domino and Chubby Checker is the oldest example I can think of without googling it). There are 'sounds' of decades. You can name sounds from the 50's, or 60's, or 80's, **all from way before this technology he's blaming existed.
Overall that video comes across as an old person who longs for the better days of their youth and is upset they can't make money in ways they want to. Welcome to the fucking world. Times change. Change with them or don't, it's your problem.
I don't know why they have to make it so hard for people to express their listening intent.
They don't. Spotify pays out roughly 66% of their revenue as royalties, while Apple Music only does about 50%. [1]
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-music-reveals-how-much-it... https://archive.is/lRZns
Man, I really, really hate this situation.
The article you cite actually claims the latter is true, so it seems looking at just that statistic is misleading.
Plus actually shitty UX/UI people like to call good, but it lacks plenty of really really basic features. Like having control over if a song is added to the queue to be played next or last, or just being able to preview what stations are going to play (it's a minefield of an UI to try and find new songs while also not interrupt the current one).
And by "doesn't work" it just says "an error occured" and nothing helps. I've even reinstalled it. Judging by reddit posts about it, it's a common issue. (Its logs also provide 0 hints about the error it encounters.)