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Comment by ferongr | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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"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.

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