I’ve been looking for a way to discover new music. Spotify used to be quite good, but now I feel like 10% of the stuff it recommends me is AI slop.
How do you navigate the music-scape?
Listen to the billions of songs made before 2016 lol. You got a lot of catching up to do.
New does not equal good.
Beyond that, follow trustworthy artists. The only way to fight the slop is with community and trust.
It’s much easier to find organic art in a community, outside the art industries.
Sure, unless you set up a lot of subscriptions it won’t just come on a consumption conveyor belt, and some people might want or expect that, but it’s much better to be in a place where you’re actually interacting with artists.
Every so often (maybe once a year) I look through my music collection and then go “Oh, I forgot about this band that I used to love” and then look them up and see if anything new from them is out. If the band has broken up I also look up the band members to see what bands they are now in or people they have worked with etc. The Six degrees of separation thing works quite well.
Record labels. For any band you like, go to their label’s website, browse the other artists on their roster or peruse the label’s past releases. The bands will likely be similar in style/sound, or at least worth checking out.
I don’t usually listen to anything newer than around 2010 anyway. 🤣
- Bandcamp
- see who tours together. If you like A and they open for B, you might like B
- indie record labels
- see who’s playing at local venues.
I know quite a few people who use bandcamp, I’ll have to give it a shot
i recently discovered Tom Lehrer through some shit post. But I guess it depends on what you define as new
“New to you” music!
My main genre is hiphop I simply discover artists via recursive checking of features
I mainly listen to electronic music for the past decade or so and have several artists I’ve listened to consistently, they’ll collab with some new artist or do a mix and include their music so I check them out and it grows from there.
Blogs and small web stuff can be pretty useful.
I only discover music through human curators I trust.
Currently it’s via the YouTube channel “worldhaspostrock”, though the word “new” might not be appropriate because as of late they’ve just been posting decade-old albums.
YT music is way better than Spotify. But some AI stuff is reccomeded .I haven’t used Spotify in probably almost a decade. I used to use Play music back in the day and got in the habit of downloading albums and uploading them I used a different service since google nuked play music and revived in as yt music.
But downloading and building your own music library you cultivate is the only way to vett music sources and ensure you aren’t listening to slop
Im starting to build a library of albums again, like I used to have ages ago
Google play music was awesome. YT music sucks ass. I do miss Grooveshark tremendously.
Spotify isn’t owned by one of the tech monopolies. And it’s European.
Go to the small concert venues and see them play.
i stopped using spotify altogether and limit myself to yt music with adblock and sometimes look at the “discover” playlist or just let the platform autoplay songs
so far I haven’t been recommended AI slop that way
I’ve used https://www.music-map.com/ a few times but not lately, so I don’t know how exclusive it is in regards to AI music.
