Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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

Today, I learned about clown core.

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 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

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 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 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

I sometimes browse the KEXP live playlist to find new artists

InnerTune on Android recommends music

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

YouTube suggested playlist

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

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

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.

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

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.