For those who pirate songs, how do you discover new music?

This is what honestly sold me on streaming. The access to music is unprecedented and so is the discovery.

To put it in perspective, I have added more 5-star songs to my library in the past 4 years than the previous 20. About 30% of most of my favorite songs were recommended by the system.

I love music. Unless I go deaf, I can’t see my life without it. And I’m glad on some level that it’s not as lucrative as movies so I’m not upset shelling out the monthly fee. Likely the only service that that’s good piracy can’t even come close for me on this one.

https://rateyourmusic.com/

You could look at everynoise.com to find artists close on the map to ones you like, and to discover related genres. It's based on Spotify's database.

I don't like using recommendation algorithms, I always discover music by human recommendations from blogs like bandcamp daily, warez websites and featuring artists

I don't I am stuck ekth the same albums send help

surprised nobody has posted soma.fm. they're a listener-supported, commercial-free internet-only radio station. i love their "fluid" channel

Last.fm Ever since I've created an account on last fm 15 years ago almost every song i listen to is scrobbled(last.fm fancy way of saying "put into database for statistics").

When you listen to enough bands it can actually provide good recommendations

i don't. i'm stuck with the music i listened to 20 years ago. 😐

listen to college/indie radio and follow their playlists.

KUOM KCPR WFMU

Follow all of your favorite artists via an app named “MusicHarbor” or “Music Butler” (web app, so you can track new releases on any device). It literally changed my life and every Friday is like a holiday since most artists release their tracks then.

Gnod

Type in 3 things you like, and you get suggestions that you yes/no as it tries to narrow down your vibe.

Great topic. A lot of my discovery was through /r/listentothis, but I'm 100% off reddit now, so these recommendations are helpful.

I use last.fm to track the songs i am listening to and ot gives spotify like recommendations and monthly statistics on what kind of music you listen to,top artist etc.

Recommendations are a must for me since I listen to genres which do not do well with western audiences in terms of organic recommendations.

If you want an automatic way to discover new music before you actually stumble upon the music itself, listenbrainz might be a decent FOSS alternative to last.fm. I would also use libre.fm on a personal server to check my own habits.

However, I also use YouTube music a lot, especially when I want to find something new. This does need one to be active on YT music with specific cookies set (in case you'd like to transfer listening history and habits across browsers/computers without signing in) to give you good recommendations. The good part is that it can likely show you good recommendations inside a few hours of you showing it what you like by playing your favourites.

For example, it was on YouTube music that I found Today is a beautiful day by Supercell and Et si tu n'existais pas by Hélène Ségara & Joe Dassin.

Cheers

Aside from what others have said, I look at what other bands the bands I already listen to tour or collaborate with.

Listen to the internet stations that are local to you, and have actual programmers daily. Some of the bigger ones in the US are KCRW, KEXP, WFMU, and any college radio station. Places that have guest bands come through and play a bit so you can hear how it sounds outside of a studio are the best in my opinion.

I was surprised to see only one other reference to Twitch. I have found Twitch to be AMAZING for new music discovery. MOST of the time when I listen to music, it is actually through Twitch. I have many good hosts saved and checking the who's on now page is the first thing I do when I want to turn on music. And when the apocalypse comes, I have a good library myself now...

There's a catch, of course. A lot of Twitch streamers are fucking irritating! It takes time to find channels that meet my needs...

• Plays my kind of music (classic rock, 80s, industrial, darkwave, synthpop, electro, gothic rock, some dance genres like filth... to name a few). If anyone wants channel recommendations I am happy to list some.
• Ideally, the video feed clearly shows the track ID (so I know what music to grab!)
• The host isn't on mic all the time. It just kills me when I find someone playing good music with track IDs and they talk too much. The more of the video frame taken up by the DJ, and the bigger the mic, the greater the chance that they won't shut up, haha.

A good host will namedrop and raid hosts with similar taste, so once you find a couple that you like, your list of follows will expand quickly.

Here are a few more tips...

• If you follow someone on Twitch, there is a separate toggle for receiving notifications when they go live. For 95% of the people I follow, notifications are OFF. A few are so good I want notifications.
• "Alternative Player for Twitch" in the Chrome extensions is a cool alternate client that MUTES ADS. There are a few such extensions, this one has been the most reliable for me. However, for some reason it does not support taking you on a raid (that is when your channel ends and sends all the viewers to someone else).
• There is a cool alternate client for Android TV called S0undTV.
• Some Twitch hosts will put their shows on Mixcloud too, so check their details
• Even if a host does not list the track IDs for what they are playing you may have success IDing music with something like Shazaam. On-screen ID is so convenient though.
• Get to know a mass tagging tool like mp3tag, and you can RAPIDLY expand the size of your music library.
• It seems impossible to tell Twitch to not suggest channels that you are not interested in. You can spend hours trying to kill off bad recommendations but it doesn't matter. For example I do not care about game streaming or people playing live music but I CANNOT get them out of my Recommended list. You just have to learn to ignore them.

Not scrolling through all the comments to see if someone mentioned this yet or not but every December I check what is on the best albums of the year lists.. Generally I check per-genre that I'm into. Like best black metal of 2023, best jazz of 2023, etc etc..

Other than that, bandcamp and YouTube are the biggest. I honestly buy more on bandcamp these days than I torrent though. It's such a great site.

I read a lot of music-related blogs, review sites and a few selected magazines. No online "recommendation system" needed.

I follow a few blogs/sites that review the music genres that I like. I also read and comment in the tracker's forums, where people suggest new music or discuss about new and old music. And I found that it's much better than getting suggestions on spotify/tidal.

BBC Radio 6 and ABC Triple J are two ad-free radio stations that play a lot of new music and are staffed by passionate and qualified DJs. A lot of my music discovery is from listening to those.

I don't, at least I'm not making an active effort. Why would I? I already have enough music to generate playlists that could last for years. That's more than enough music.
Apart from that there's the usual cultural osmosis that can't be avoided. A song that is used in a movie, plays on a radio/car stereo or at an event somewhere and you like it. Bam, discovery!

I usually listen to the radio, or let ViMusic (YouTube music algorithm) recommend me songs. Then I use yt-dlp (Seal app on F-Droid) to download them.

Review sites for genres I like. I find a lot of new music on Angry Metal Guy. That one's just for metal, but there are all kinds of different review sites

Spotify and YouTube to find music. Torrenting and buying to keep it forever.

Mainly local radio broadcasts, sometimes thematic webradios such as Radio Metal. Recently I've been linking my music player to LastFM so we'll see how it performs.

I go to concerts/look up who's touring with the band. It ends up being more than the subscription cost, but it goes to the venue and band rather than Spotify and Joe Rogan.

I use Discogs to find music I've never heard of, and artists/bands that I have forgotten about. I choose an artist I love, and then just click on the genre link in their profile to see others in that same genre. You can also click on the links of other bands they were in. There is also a Recommendations carousel that appears at the bottom of the page.

Back when I was on both what.cd and waffles, the free leech periods were great. I discovered a few artists I really enjoyed after. Months after even. Bored, going through gigs of tunes browsing, a few just hit. Even found myself interested in genres I 'wasn't into'.

Youtube, cracked spotify, collab with artist I already like, rythm games, friend recommendations...

Abd then I download with soulseek, sort and send to my phone with musicbee and listen with musicolet

It requires a lot of filtering, but I find Pitchfork.com reliably has something decent in their "best new ..." pages. Just don't actually read the reviews.

RYM

YouTube shuffle, Bandcamp feed, internet radio stations

I like EDM and electronic music so I just leave the radio on with Tomorrowland One World Radio while I work. I also browse sites like beatport and look at their charts and if I find something I like I check out other people are buying, sometimes I pirate, sometimes I buy if I want to support a small label or a lesser known artist.

I pay a little to pirate. Basically I've figured out how to download a large percentage of lossless songs from playlists I find anywhere. I scrape playlists of radio stations i like. I import those CSVs into Soundiiz, which costs $4/mo. Youtube mixes I like, in they go the same way, imoporting tracklists. Using Soundiiz, I import those lists into qobuz and deezer, which I use to pull down lossless FLACs using deemix and qobuz-dl in linux. Qobuz and Deezer and other streaming services have curated playlists by staff and subscribers, I just download the whole lists. I replaced lists of my mp3s like youtube rips, with FLACs, the same way. Qobuz and Deezer have free trial memberships but TBH after the sheer amount I've pulled down from them, it's worth it to me. I've had to buy new hard drives because of this.

Spider chart at the bottom of Orpheus’ web site!

It’s not as good as WCD’s was, but it’s getting there.

NPR New Music Friday is helpful a lot of the time

I don't pirate songs, but I guess I would use a scrobbler and then ListenBrainz suggestions

mostly from different subreddits i follow. others are record companies, and youtube channels like audiotree, kexp, tiny desk

Personal recommendations, NPR Tiny Desk, movie and show soundtracks, Bandcamp, record stores, Library of Congress Homegrown Concerts on YouTube, looking into any bands you like and seeing what else the members have been in.

I usually get it from the YouTube algorithm, but I'll also check up on some labels every now and then and see what they got new. I also follow some individual artists.

I use the ReVanced version of YouTube Music (no ads, high quality music). If I find a song that I like, I download it in FLAC format from one of the sites in the megathread

Today, I learned about clown core.

I used to listen to the radio and record songs on my feature phone (mono 16k 4bit samples/s).

Now !kulturgut@feddit.de and downloading using NewPipe (I don't care about quality).

I use Rate Your Music but I use it in a very peculiar way. Most of my listening is from scrolling through Latest Reviews for something that stands out and listening to it.

The second most common way I use RYM is to go to the page of an album I think is really special and click on user made lists that album is a part of and scroll through for things that look interesting.

The third way is when I notice I've liked a few things from a specific scene I like to go to the page for the record label that often represents artists from that scene. Currently I'm exploring Dischord Records.

Fourth, is if a genre is obscure or specific enough I will look at the charts for that genre. This is most common with electronic music, because it's so heavily taxonomized. Take for example Purple Sound which only has a couple hundred releases associated with it.

This definitely isn't how I recommend everyone find new music. But I do recommend freeing yourself from an algorithm and forging your own path. I find that algorithms often funnel a person into some kind of local maximum where most music presented is palatable but the chance to discover something revolutionary to their tastes decreases immensely, and to me that's just a bummer.

I sometimes browse the KEXP live playlist to find new artists

I literally type "new music" into YouTube and see where it takes me.

InnerTune on Android recommends music

I get most of my recommendations via Diaspora and Mastodon (2 social networks that are part of the fediverse). They allow you to follow hashtags, so I just follow the hashtags of the music I'm interested and see people's posts that are tagged with them

Most music I have is from "Pay what you want" albums from Ponies@Dawn, VibePoniez, A State Of Sugar, etc.
When I come across artists I like, I tend to check out their other tracks and grab the ones I like.

Check out new songs from youtube, spotify, music sites and later download them and store them locally as 256 or 320 kbps mp3 files. I used to be a fan of billboard Top 100, but nowadays it's just crap. Occasionally I do purchase from the artist's site if available just to support them.

im sad I got kicked off some private trackers for inactivity after streaming picked up 😮‍💨

I am new to the music game but I still use the "discovery weeky" on Spotify and go from there as I used to use Spotify so it knows what I like. I just listen to it once or twice a week to see if I like any of it.

I don't anymore, now that I use Spotify. But when I did, it was YouTube recommendations to find new music and then torrent the whole discography to find the ones I liked

Spotify APK with no ads and premium features. I then pirate what I like

RIP rs.4chan.org, which compiled every RapidShare and MediaFire link on any board. You could scroll through and snag anything that sounded remotely interesting.

Talking to people

Youtube

Listenbrainz (or other scrobbling service)

Subscribing to communities of the genre of music you like

Music-map.com

Following artists you like on social media

I mainly listen to Japanese doujin music. It's naturally good for discovery because many artists group together to form circles (independent labels) and release compilation albuns. I listen to the various annual compilation series I like, and every now and then there will be a new artist featuring on them so I'll look up that artist and discover circles they feature on regularly. And when I discover a new circle, I naturally discover new compilation series and new artists.

The primary piracy resource for doujin music is Doujinstyle. One of the unique things about the doujin scene is that the pirates and the artists generally have a fairly good relationship. Most circles let Doujinstyle share their music because they understand it benefits them, and the minority who don't submit requests to Doujinstyle who will always comply out of respect. As an alternative, these circles allow their music to be shared in the Doujinstyle Discord channels. Some of the artists even hang out in the Discord with the pirates. It's a really interesting community that has formed over decades but never lost its tightknit feel.

1. Google searches for open directories. One dude found an RIAA directory full of media, but it quickly got secured.

2. YouTube

3. Ringtone sites

4. Asian (Indian) sites, with heavy use of Google translate.

Bandcamp

If you can tolerate twitch streamers, watching musicians from artists you listen to on twitch will often lead you to music you may like.

Piracy is how i discover music, to a large extent. I see something i might like? I listen.

Musicroamer.com

Friends

Soundcloud. I pick a song already on my likes, and get a randomised station based around that song

youtube: charts 2023, played with --no-video.

YouTube suggested playlist

IRC

Permanently Deleted

You can like scrape the data from Spotify Playlists and yt music and like a regularly updated local copy of that..

Usually I look to my private trackers top 10 of the day/week.

Rarely does something new slip by me.

I don't download full albums, just individual songs I like.

The sources are basically anywhere I hear music, but generally, it's by listening to radio.

As of now, this has already got me to 1,179 songs with 3 in queue to be downloaded. (If you're curious, those in queue are: Dana International - Diva; New Kids On The Block - Step By Step; Prince - Purple rain)
It is hard to call it discovery in this case, more like a reminder of the songs since I knew them already.

Other sources include, but are not limited to: Browsing YouTube playlists, searching for artists to see if they have more good songs, buying a CD compilation, searching for someone's Spotify playlist after peeking into their phone when I liked multiple songs (they didn't want to share the playlist, but left it "public"), Bus Simulator Ultimate (there I discovered 2 artists, Melihcan and Cem Kılıç), old tapes, bus driver with a Bluetooth speaker (and me with Shazam), parts of songs randomly appearing in my head from who knows where, background music in videos.

As I said, everywhere I can hear music.

I don't think I'm pirating since I'm not reuploading, but I'm downloading Spotify playlists using Spotdl. So, I find music using Spotify.

Not for music, but there's https://github.com/Fallenbagel/jellyseerr

tunefind when I hear something I like while binge watching, and occasionally to see what others seem to enjoy these days (although that only matches in say 10-15% of the cases).

Tunetank.com let's you download 3 songs for free, or I think $10 a month for unlimited songs

Just steal access to someone’s Spotify credentials.