Call me basic, but I have no shortage of new music from Spotify and YouTube. Spotify recommendations plus shared playlists from friends. There are a handful of YT channels that host pretty consistent quality musicians, like NPR Tiny Desk, KEXP, Colors Studios, Zildjian Live.

I use rateyourmusic.com to research a genre/artist/ album and then follow where it leads me. It’s amazing how much music is outside the algorithms, and then you get to find them in a differ context too.

I stream online radio while commuting.

It’s a great way of discovering what people in other countries listen to or what is happening in certain genres etc.

The small online stations are better than ordinary radio because they usually don’t have commercials and no need to attract large numbers of listeners so they don’t always play the most popular garbage over and over.

It’s as if removing all the commercial aspects of radio makes better radio.

I downloaded what I liked. Now I am stuck with them

Spotify auto-generated playlists

I am still riding the MP3 train. Music from indies and smaller bands I buy on Bandcamp or directly from the artist. Bigger bands from larger labels and really obscure stuff I get from Soulseek.

Discovering music got more difficult after leaving Reddit, I lurked on a lot of genre subs. Now I mostly find new stuff through friends or Youtube recommendations.

Spotify (Web app with ublock and cracked APK), songs from movies/shows, and songs discovered from content creators on twitch and YouTube

metal-archives.com

Mostly YouTube recommendations and long compilation videos people have posted to YouTube.

Favourites currently are:

• Internet radio. Especially radiofreefedi.net which features music from people on the fediverse. I especially like their comfy channel. #radiofreefedi #RFF

• Music podcasts. The Add To Playlist podcast from the BBC is my favourite. Each track they add is inspired by the previous one. Loads of great music, plus interesting guest musicians talking about music history, theory and vibes.

• ViMusic. This is an open source front end app for YouTube music on android. No payment, adds etc. You can get it on f-droid. Found a few cool tracks via the algo but not as many as previous options.

I have to say though that, like the boomers who went before me, I feel that music in general has become worse. I’m blaming the ‘winner takes all’ effect of commercial streaming platforms for the narrowing of artistic culture and the debasement of musicians.

I may sound old, but I still use Pandora and it has been one of my best avenues for new music and artists for the last 15 years I’ve had my account. It knows my tastes very well at this point and the recommendations are almost always spot on.

Pandora works pretty well for discovery, and has multiple “modes” so you can hear album tracks, not just hits. Just put in a few songs of a genre and/or artists you like to build a station of similar suggestions. Use thumbs up/down to tune it. I will warn you that after a year of doing this, it might get in a rut of playing things you’ve already thumbed up. If that happens, switch modes or create a new station.

YouTube suggestions also has a pretty decent suggestion algorithm if you start thumbing up music you like. It’s also a good place to look at a particular label’s catalog.

Both are free with ads.

Also, if there’s an artist you like, be sure to look up who produced your favorite tracks. Chances are they’ve done similar music with other artists.

A mix of Spotify (I have a premium account there), and my own collection of CDs which I have ripped and can access via Jellyfin for higher audio quality.

Mostly through friends, Bandcamp, sometimes BBC Radio 6. And catching random bands at festivals and liking them.

Spotify is still good to me with recommendations based on what I have previously liked.

But also a lot of video memes will have bangers I seek out.