How to find (a) new music (community)?
i'm a huge lover of music. i listen to music, i collect music (digital and vinyl) for 25 years now. i organize and go to festivals. i play music as a dj (mostly cumbia, afro and house). i looove pop, but as a genere. just everything that is authentic and makes me feel and groooves.
my heart beats to the beat of this amazing hip hop beats. jazz-funk-house and everythig around and in between. and mexican music, be it traditional. modern traditional or pinche rancheras que escuchaban los abuelos. but fuck generes, if it grooves and makes me happy or a special kind of sad, i love it.
but as i get older, it just seems to be getting harder and harder to find and connect to music.
i think part of it is that i just know soo much already. but in comparison to what exisit... thats just bullshit, is it me taking less time and love for music or is it that i get less sensitive to music as i grow older?
i dont know where i'm going with this. but i think i want to connect to other people who i can share music i love with. but its so hard to find people who share my kind of taste.
whatever this post nothing structured, but if you like some of the following please reach out.
or Griz, or Gramatik, or St.Germain or ASM or soooo much more i can not even grasp what i like., its just too much and diverse.
i just miss discovering music.. maybe its my process.. i dont use any streaming sites, exept for youtube sometimes for its accesibility to share. i pirate and buy and go to concerts. but it seems everybody arround just shares spotify playlists... and i'm just not getting into that, fuck algorithms deciding my taste. fuck big music.
what do i do? can i find back to the joy of finding a new album i like and loose myself for days and weeks in it? is this a possibility? do i need to find a new way to enjoy and discover music?
is it me? or is it getting harder?
just as a disclaimer, i like what happens here on tildes music wise, but it mostly feels quite far from my tastes. no bad feelings, i like you anyways ;-)
edit: the covers topic going hot atm is just the best in a long time.
I don't know about any science on this, but as an older music lover, I definitely know the feeling. A couple of first thoughts:
That alone makes it so that you will need to search longer to find something you like. But culture has changed too. The majority of music is not listened to by putting on a CD or a record, but it is an endless, algorithmically picked playlist for listening in the background. Nothing wrong with that if you like it, but it is a different kind of activity than putting something on and actually listening to it with your full attention. That type of listening overshadows the other more intentional one also in the discovery of music, making it harder to "connect" (don't know a better word) to the music and their makers.
But the good thing is in the first bullet point: there is more good music available than ever. You can find it if you persist. To give an example for myself: I have the KEXP Full Performance playlist in my RSS reader. Every once in a while, I go through the whole list and only one in about thirthy videos is one I watch through the end and will go out to seek more of that artist. I discovered Kerala Dust that way, for instance.
But also the more old school methods still work, even if they are not as vibrant anymore. You can still browse last.fm to find related artists. You can still go on Soulseek and browse other peoples collections. Lastly I often start reading the reviews on rateyourmusic.com for the album I am currently listening to. If I had more time, I would start exploring the charts and lists on there more as well.
KEXP is my favourite way to find new music, I'd also shout out BBC Radio 6 live and Tiny Desk performances. There are some great music discussion podcasts too, I really enjoy James Acaster's Perfect Sounds, Sticky Notes, and The Soundtrack Show
I too feel it's more difficult to get excited about new music as I get older. But every now and then, something still pops up that hits so hard that it becomes a part of my identity.
For discovery, I currently follow these through my RSS reader (links are to websites, not the feeds):
These are also good sources for discovery but don't have easy RSS feeds:
I'd like to widen my horizons to more international music, but it's challenging to find good sources, especially ones with RSS feeds. I'd love to hear if anyone has recommendations for publications to follow from their region of the world. Can be in any language.
I use Spotify and like how easy it is to keep track of new releases from my favourite artists, as it gives me a list of new releases from artists that I follow. It doesn't seem to be filtered in any way, just sorted by date. I check it every Friday.
In general, I have found that using a streaming service doesn't force one to listen to playlists or bend to the algorithm's wills. I primarily listen to albums, so I just use Spotify's search function to find specific releases and pretty much ignore all algorithmic suggestions. Although, I do find the automatically generated artist compilations ("This Is X") useful when getting to know an artist I haven't listened to before. As for playlists, I rarely listen to those, and when I do, I strongly prefer human curated lists as opposed to ones Spotify generates automatically.
Posted this elsewhere last week but private trackers and radio.garden
You’re welcome
radio.garden is awesome. thank you so much. this is my favourite thing now
NTS Radio is the app you want
Most of the old sites I used to frequent have closed, but some are still kicking!.
The most common way I find new bands is listening to the upcoming artists at a few venues that have always been a showcase for great new talent. The Pop Scene events at the Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco is a big one. I was able to see the Arctic Monkeys there before they blew up. My sister saw Vampire Weekend. Lot of eventual big acts roll right through. Not everything is a hit, but I look at their calendar pretty frequently to hear new bands. Ditto for Thee Stork Club in Oakland, The Chapel in SF, and Moe's Alley in Santa Cruz. Other venues I frequented in my 20s, like the Independent or Slims, work too. Other than that, sometime I'll see who is opening for bands that I like. Usually they'll be in the same ballpark.
Honestly it's quite a bit of sifting and I only get in the mood once every few months while I'm making my seasonal playlist. I think it's tough to do a music chat on here because people have such wide ranging tastes, but there is always the option to make a monthly "new music" post.
Edit - I just looked through the Chapel calendar and honestly I'm very into 1/2 the bands playing (and very sad to see all 4 nights of OSEEs is sold out) and going to be checking out the other 1/2 I don't know tomorrow. Thanks for the reminder, looks like I might be buying some tickets for the summer!
Your tastes are not quite mine, though we probably have some overlap, and others are covering where to find new music, but I will note that as another music obsessive I'm also finding it hard to find online music communities. There were some really good forums and message boards 20 to 30 years ago that I just don't see around now and I miss them. Not being 20 anymore is probably not helping but neither is Facebook having killed forums.
If any others have know of good online homes for this sort of stuff that aren't owned by Zuckerberg et el I'm also interested.
Chorus.fm has been my online music community since it was absolutepunk.net and I’d say it’s still going pretty strong for the pop-punk and indie-rock genres. The weekly Friday new music post always generates a lot of recs and discussion and the community pages and music forums are pretty active. Discussed genres include pop, pop-punk, alternative, indie-rock, hardcore and to a lesser extent some of everything else under the sun but mostly where other genres intersect or come close to pop-punk and indie rock.
Most algorithmic recommendations have fallen flat for me, so I usually avoid them.
I used to find new stuff through subreddits dedicated to sub-genres I like. I now mostly just listen to new music from the artists I already know and like. I use a free service called muspy to send me emails to notify when my followed artists have new releases. They also have a personalized web calendar I imported.
Tildes is small but its collective interests are wide. I never really know when I post something from my niche little interest range if anyone will connect with it.
A small forum I was in ran a Song of the Week program every week for quite a while. We threw songs into a Dropbox, gave scores and thoughts in a txt, and kept a big scoreboard. Obviously there were some occasional problems with people gaming this or playing to the crowd, but it was hella fun. Lots of theme weeks and debauchery.
Obviously this is harder on the scale of tildes (forum was like ~40 people with 7-8 participants) but I imagine someone could find some neat ways to do something like that here. Just a thought!
man this sounds really fun!
I discovered this website that plots every known genre (via Spotify) on a scatterplot (w song snippets as an example). Its quite fascinating and will likely help you understand what kinds of sound you haven't explored yet!
Every Noise
Spotify is great for discovery, though. You don’t have to pay for it, just make a playlist of your favourite stuff then check who it adds at the end.