Used to be easy. Just walk into a record store, browse the titles, find stuff that looked interesting.
Now I stream on my iPhone, and it’s easy to look for stuff that I already know about. My library is mainly old favourites, nothing new.
I’m a bit hampered because my tastes run to classical, renaissance and baroque, with a bit of jazz tossed in. Stuff that doesn’t get talked about much, in other words.
But how you find new stuff that you like?
Used to be, I’d hear new stuff on the radio, and I’d eventually say Oh, hey, I like that one about some of the songs. But I don’t really radio anymore.
Now, I find new stuff from friend recommendations or from the song being featured on a TV show or a movie I like. And video games. I discovered quite a few songs I liked on GTA V.
I listen to my local classical radio station, WCLV. They have more music than god, and I often find music I didn’t know about.
I enter an artist I like, or a specific song, into Pandora and it plays similar songs. From there, I expand it outward finding new musicians to create Nw Pandora stations. Lather, rinse and repeat.
I’ve been back into “explaratory mode” for music, and right now it’s mostly listening to BBC Music 6, sprinkled with stuff from WKXP, NME 1 & 2, and Youtube videos (I like to check out Tiny Desk concerts.) And, of course, recommendations from friends and family.
Spotify creates playlists for its listeners based on their tastes. One is Release Radar, another is Discover Weekly. Each one gives you a weekly list of 30 tunes, which you thumbs-up or thumbs-down to fine-tune future lists.
I build my own playlist from the songs that I like from these lists.
mmm
I don’t watch much tv or movies. Don’t play video games.
Don’t have a local classical music radio station. Rock, soft rock, country, country-rock …
What is Pandora? How does it work?
How do I listen to BBC Music 6? Don’t recognise the others. Don’t like videos.
What is Spotify? How does it work?
[sigh] Thank you all for comments. Just confirms that I’m a true techno-peasant.
Turn left at Greenland!
BBC World Music Archive:
Mostly by listening to the radio. I’ve found lots of good Australian artists by listening to Triple J and lots of good NZ artists by listening to Radio NZ.
Songs playing in movies & TV shows is a major source these days. This question makes me really miss Napster. For those not old enough to remember Napster was an early music-sharing app. People would upload music they liked and you could download as many songs as you wanted, all free. Didn’t last long before being deemed illegal, but it was the best source I’ve ever found for discovering new music.
I just tell Alexa or Siri to play BBC World 6. I believe it’s played specifically through the Tune In app. Radio Garden has it as well (as well as the other music stations I mentioned). If you don’t have Radio Garden, it’s available through your phone’s app store, or at
The direct link to BBC Radio 6 is here:
There are various programs depending on time of day. The type of music they play is mostly indie/alternative/old post-punk/techno/etc. depending on the schedule, so check in at different times of day. I got an unexpected blast from the past today when they started playing LA Style’s “James Brown Is Dead.” And then they’ll play up-to-date stuff like Wet Leg, IDLES, and Kae Tempest. It’s a nice mix for my personal tastes.
For your tastes, the BBC 3 recommendation in this thread would be better suited and available in Radio Garden.
Pandora is a website/app. If you want to listen for free, there are ads, although it’s less intrusive than a radio program. You can search for an artist, or a song and listen to similar artists, or songs.
I just looked under the lettuce, and there it was!
I use what I call YouTube wormholes. I’ll look up a song or an artist and after listening to that, check the listing on the side of the screen and check out stuff I haven’t heard, or stuff I’ve heard, but want to hear again, then check the side listing for that tune. Sometimes my starting point is just songs on my YouTube homepage, sometimes it is links found reading online.
Which brings us to the SDMB itself. I find a lot of music I haven’t heard before in Cafe Society. And if you are of a mind to, you can always start a thread asking for specific music (there’s a recent one by @RitterSport that collects funk performances, but only from the past few years, there’s another from a while back that asked for examples of the prominent use of horns in Rock music)
I used to listen to a Jazz program late at night. Took notes of artists.
Youtube random AI pics based on whatever [my regular liked stuff?] and I will hear something in a movie or somewhere, google a lyric and find it that way.
There are ways of listening to WCLV non-locally, but I’m not knowledgeable in that area. I know there are worldwide listeners.
I don’t really seek new music any more. For light music, I’m quite happy with my music collection from the 60’s – 90’s. It encompasses a variety of genres, including rock, pop, jazz, funk, country, folk and American Standards. With bass-heavy music I crank up my subwoofer and literally shake the house.
For heavy music (which is my mainstay) I listen to baroque, classical and romantic era music. I already know what I like in these genres, and only seek new artists who play them well (e.g. I follow Yuga Wang on Youtube because she’s a phenomenal concert piano virtuoso and I love her style).
But, every once in a while my daughters introduce me to a group that I connect with. My Chemical Romance is one contemporary group in particular that I like a lot.
Once upon a time, I was hanging out with little cadre of musically adventurous folks. I got turned on to a lot of great music through friends that way, including seventies prog rock, avant-garde music, psychedelic rock, and whatnot.
On Fridays, I’d cash my paycheck and make the rounds of used record stores, where I’d browse through LPs. If I saw something with interesting art or a provocative band name, I’d pull it out of the bin and look at the back cover, hoping the musicians would be listed, and buy the record if I saw a name I knew from other music I already liked. But all that was many years ago, and I’ve lost touch with folks in that little group.
These days, it’s largely online. I can google “bands that sound like Univers Zero.” Or find one of their albums on Amazon and then look at the “people who bought this also bought” section. Or, as others have mentioned, follow YouTube recommendations. Or look up the discography of a musician I like and find out what he or she has done that I might not be aware of.
And then, in any of those cases (especially the situation where I’m already on YouTube clicking on recommendations), I can probably find something on YouTube to listen to. (I’m really not sold on services such as Pandora and the like, at least not yet, but YouTube is free.)
My Wife and I are both 61 yo. Now, with a good internet connection we stream our music. We listen when we play chess. That’s a lot really, roughly 300 games a year.
We listen to classic rock. There is so much good stuff. I’m rediscovering a lot of stuff. No desire to find anything new.
I’ve always known that my Wife likes Pink Floyd, and I love them. Never realized just how much my Wife likes them though.