Used to be from friends.

Then it was Spotify since it had a good recommendation system (it doesn’t anymore) based on what I already liked.

Now it’s mostly the “what am I listening to” app on my phone while watching meme videos and what people share on Lemmy. All the music sharing communities here have pretty good taste.

Bandcamp new and notable

Bands I like touring with other bands

Record labels I like put out new stuff

From shows I watch and games I play. I don’t really go out of my way to search for music. If I find something interesting, it’s usually on YouTube.

I take the brute approach: get music packs bundling all releases for a day, load the albums into a lightweight player, filtered by genre. Anything sounding nice results in a beet import.

A mix of BBC radio 6 and recommendations from my cousin who works in the music industry. I can’t give you my cousin’s details, but radio 6 has a great range of music from some of the DJs.

Two great blogs I’ve found through Mastodon:

• https://nham.co.uk/
• https://www.etherdiver.com/category/other-peoples-music/

Both blogs have an RSS feed, and they post on Mastodon when a new article is up. Those two have accounted for almost everything I’ve bought on Bandcamp recently. Mastodon in general, and the #bandcampfriday hashtag, are great sources.

I also started buying physical media lately. Lemme tell ya, the guy behind the counter at the record store knows everything. EVERYTHING. All bands. Who toured with whom. He is the human scrobbler. Get to know him.

spotify discover weekly. its been so finely tuned over the years that 90% of them are at least put in my liked playlist, and maybe 50% into my favorites playlist

i used to follow this “greatest _____ album” tournement thing on facebook, but stopped doing that because i dont use facebook anymore

you can also do the 1001albumsgenerator, which will give you a random album a day from the book “1001 albums you must hear before you die”

YouTube still works like that. I get maybe one or two AI recommendations a month and just click the “don’t show me this crap” button

YouTube music is still pretty good for me, the canned playlists sometimes turn up good bands I’ve not heard of, and recommendations about as good as they ever were, not great but good.

But there is a community radio station here with a variety of shows, a couple are ‘alternative’ and those DJs have good taste and stay on top of new stuff.

Also opening bands at shows, and sometimes at yoga class, oddly.

I want to purge Spotify from my life, but it does a lot to turn me onto music.

First I start a playlist with a general vibe I’m looking for, then either go to playlist radio and add tracks I like that come up, or scroll down to suggested tracks and start adding them from there.

I also have a special playlist where every time I hear a tune and go “damn, that’s good”, regardless of genre, it gets added there. The suggested stuff for that one is pretty solid.

The custom auto-generated Discover Weekly and Release Radar playlists are really good for surprises too. And other people’s playlists can be really great.

For electronic music, I have a di.fm subscription, and listen to that a lot. Plenty of great stuff has come to me via Shazam from there

I ditched YouTube Music and spent two weeks downloading all the albums I only had on there to my old iTunes folder which I stopped updating in 2018.
Now I can expand all the individual artist folders in Mac OS’ file browser to give me list of every album in my library, copy and paste that into an LLM (Deepseek in my case) and ask it for analysis and recommendation based on my taste.

It works incredibly well and lets me ask for specific recommendations for whatever I’m in the mood for. Same with movies. 10/10.

Decided to start paying for Qobuz amd its been a great time so far! Audio quality is top notch, and their focus on exploring individuals/bands albums are very good. Id recommend giving the service a go, they also pay artists a much better share compared to Spotify…

internet radio.

Spotify discover weekly has introduced me to some bangers, and their app has some really great features with a pretty deep library.

I know they suck in some ways, but overall I am pretty happy with their service.

Half of the time it’s just yt recommendations since I don’t get genAI slop auto thrown at me while listening to vocaloid/utau songs since they probably already categorize it as genAI despite it being in a weird gray area. It’s the closest you can get to ethical genAI¹ music, especially since you still got to put in a lot of work yourself.

From there I sometimes look through the producers channel if it’s their official channel and not some rando uploading a NicoNico/BiliBili/wherever exclusive song. If something really catches my eye, I have a good chance of clicking to try it.

¹ programs like Diffsinger and the latest vocaloid voicebanks use AI but not in a suno kind of way. Consenting people using their voices for these VBs, though harder to say if consentual for DF because anyone can make one. Latest vocaloid VBs went back to what was originally done in the first VBs in the mid-late 2000s: using machine learning

Edit:

I also find stuff through CDs I find at thrift stores and a nearby CD shop. Again, whatever catches my eye.