I got hit hard by the “locked into music you listened to in your early-mid 20s” thing. I blame what.cd collapsing and being too busy to keep up with new music/go to shows.

I actually have a routine where I require myself to listen to at least one album I’ve never heard before every single day. It took a while for it to become a habit, but doing so has helped me discover a lot of music I like. When listening, I often write down tracks that I’d like to revisit in particular. I either listen to 1 LP (full studio albums) or 2 EPs (extended plays) to meet the daily “requirement.” The problem then becomes knowing which of these albums you want to listen to, but for me, it’s easy to narrow it down by genre. I like a lot of progressive metal/djent projects for instance, so I can go diving for those, a lot of which are instrumental, and I fuck with that too.

For a little while algorithms actually made it easier to find cool new music but now they’ve all gone back to profit profit profit.

Music needs a tiktok algorithm.

Listening to the same songs on repeat for 8 years gang.

You’re not wrong. I always hated the cultural imperialism that kept me from enjoying music from the world over.

That said, if you follow a college radio station or find a niche subculture, stuff opens up pretty fast from there. While Bandcamp isn’t the best in terms of quality, upon discovering a new genre just search there based on tag. For example, the anarcho-punk genre tag has a lot of Slavic stuff.

Honestly my music taste was heavily influenced by video game soundtracks from games I played as a kid and teenager. Rise Against, TV On The Radio, Queens Of The Stone Age, etc, I heard them all first on video game soundtracks for the Need For Speed and Burnout games. So I guess that’s how I discovered music in the past? I definitely didn’t get it from my parents or classmates.

Check out KEXP.org they have tons of shows that feature artists from all over the world. Great way to constantly discover new music.

DI.fm has a lot of new / not mainstream artists. I’ve found a few artists on indie mixes of “inspired by” movie / game. On that note Overclocked.net is another way. Game music seems to have a few good ones. So indie game studios would have a lot of relatively unknown artists that don’t get a lot of attention. Soundtracks are usually up on YT.

There’s a radio station in the area that also has a strong indie upcomer musicians, but itxs really hit or miss because it’s a grab bag of stuff which may or may not click and 80% of the time they play “traditional” stuff.

Find a station near some college town too. That’s usually where a lot of artists get their start and college DJs are promoting indie stuff all the time. Websites and broadcasts.

Lot of the stuff is just out of the main stream way and you have to seek. But there’s a rule of the universe that if you seek, what you seek will seek you back. So I hope whatever itch you need scratching finds you.

I actually recently got into the habit to listening to old NPR tiny desk concerts episodes on YouTube during Work or shorter drives. Discovered quite a few artists I normally would never have listened to. But sadly it is limited to a bunch of genres, so no stuff like metall, etc

Cost/benefit. Seems to me like investing a lot of time, and (somehow) being vulnerable (or on-edge?), just to find nothing… most of the time.

It’s actually never been easier to find new and fantastic music, you just need to know where to look, here’s where I go digging when I feel the need to:

1 Music Labels on Bandcamp There’s been an explosion of fantastic music labels over the last few decades, often specializing in reissues of forgotten classics and music from the global south, here are a few that I like, with a lot of them selling their stuff on bandcamp:

• Soundway Records, whose newest release is a comp of 70s and 80s Boogie and Funk from Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Hong Kong and the Phillipines

• Light in the Attic Records, who do stuff from classic japanese ambient releases to forgotten soul classics from the early 70s (both of these albums are absolutely fantastic and come highly recommended by me)

• Habibi Funk, who de reissues and new releases from everywhere in the arab world Analog Africa, who deliver the hottest dance tunes from all over africa from fifty years ago

• Music from Memory who do absolutely fantastically curated reissues of anything between pop (<this one is another absolute fav of mine) and ambient and experimental

• Numero Group who are very hip and in right now and who do tons of different stuff, too much for me to choose just one release but they also have loads of playlists of their music online

This is just a small selection of stuff I am into and my interests are admittedly fairly narrow, but you can do this for every genre you like. Just pick a band/an album you love, look up what label it was released under and look up that label (you can also use discogs or rateyourmusic for this if the label isn’t active anymore/their website sucks).

2 Internet Radio

Now I don’t listen to as much of this as I probably should, but there are great radios out there, but if you wanna be really hip you should listen to NTS who have in the past done tons of collabs with famous musicians and have tons of DJs who play weekly programs.

3 Rateyourmusic

Now this website is definitely full of stupid nerds, but if you are looking for popular and famous releases in specific decades, genres or countries I don’t know of a better place to look for them. As soon as you go to actually lesser known music it sucks, but if you want a good overview of a specific genre or decade of music you will get it there (if obviously with a heavy internet-music-nerd bias).

Now this is already more good music than you could ever hope to listen in a lifetime, so you could also just do what I do, which really is the only sensible thing left to do, which is to solely listen to the Beach Boys and Beach Boys bootlegs.

Some music communities are better for this than others. Metal has a million resources and people from all over the world. You can get like blogs, podcasts, archives of bands, relationship charts, theory books. People (outside of Reddit) will give you a bunch of generally good recommendations.

Meanwhile classical is basically locked behind randomly cruising YouTube, looking for old LP records at higher-end music shops, and music education.

Any sort of folk music has basically nothing unless you specifically live in the place that folk music is from.

I like '80s/'90s synthy new age music and that’s got basically nothing outside RYM and whatever Vaporwave artists are sampling, or if it’s a side project of someone who became a movie or game music composer.

I’ve found the YouTube algorithm pretty good for finding new stuff (done pretty well at recommending post-punk stuff to me recently), but also radio stations. Most of the good ones are online, but BBC 6music has some really good shows for discovering both new bands and older stuff you never ran into. Iggy Pop goes for particularly deep cuts of niche genres, so tends to be interesting even if you’re never going to listen to any of it again.

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