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kalleboo

> I still use WinAmp

How do you discover new music?

> Perhaps I'm getting too old for this

Aha, I see

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>How do you discover new music?

Not him but personally, I still discover music the same way I have for the past 17 years. Music sites, conversation with fans of bands I like, magazines, bandcamp (myspace in the old days), spontaneous purchases of 2nd hand CDs in stores...

Personally, I find automatic recommendation services lacking both in recommendation quality and diversity of things to recommend from.

"Discovering new music" is a massively overblown concept. I discover plenty of new music without going out of my way to do it but if I was trapped on a desert island with my current 40 some gb of music I'd probably be more than content with that for a few decades.

I'd probably be content as well, but I think about some of my all-time favourite songs, and how a lot of them were discovered by chance or through some obscure means. And I wonder just how many more "all-time favourites" are out there waiting to be discovered. That's what keeps me actively listening to new music, and indeed, I have found some truly excellent music through music-recommendation services (last.fm mostly).

Personally, I find automatic recommendation services lacking both in recommendation quality and diversity of things to recommend from.

They work great if you've never heard Rhianna or Maroon 5 before. YouTube has put a lot of work into ensuring that Lady Gaga gets recommended to everybody.

I agree. I scrobble to last.fm and usually just dig around the similar artists area whenever I find new music. Finding IDs of tracks I enjoy on mixes are also another source for my library.

What the fuck is scrobbling?

It's a silly word that last.fm uses to mean streaming metadata of all music you play to them so they can mine it and do all the crunching they do to run their service regardless of what player you use. A scrobbler can also refer to a plugin to some music player application that sends said metadata to last.fm.

Thanks for the explanation. In that case I will stick to winamp and my circa 2000 minidisc player, neither of which puke my playlist over the internet.

"How do you discover new music?"

I ask my friends, I ask the people at my local record store, I read blogs and listen to podcasts. What I don't do is rely on the terrible Amazon style "if you bought this, you might buy that" style of nonsense.

Pandora has the technology, but their catalog is way too limited. I've said this before, but music discovery is a problem that is not obviously amenable to a market-oriented solution.

Pandora has a much larger catalog than your local record store. Pandora is amazing for music discovery, I'd say far better than the hipsters working in amoeba records that are seldom older than Jerry Garcia's guitars.

I used to use your methods, but have discovered far more thanks to pandora and YouTube than I ever did.

I can't say I am impressed with Pandora. Eventually all my Pandora stations just start playing The Cure. The Cure is okay, but not what I was looking from in my "Hall of the mountain king" station...

I think that they suffer from overtraining problems that limit the diversity of their suggestions. They've got a good catalog but, in my experience, are poor at diverse suggestions.

Resurrection records in Camden, London.

No shit music and no fucking hipsters.

The same way I always did: by recommendation of humans and going to gigs. Oh and playing it (I play keyboard, guitar, clarinet and drums).

The world did still turn before everything went all crazy shit "social". Stuff was still found, music was still listened to.

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