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.

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.

Modernrock.ca

Been a supporter since he started.

Rival Suns

Spiritbox

Kanaan

Love Honey - (Rolling 7s - holy shit is this good!{if you are me, which I am})

Psychedelic Porn Crumpets

Sick Joy

Vance Joy

Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers

Tiger cub

Mammoth

Chokecherry

Ren - (Hi Ren is fucking powerful, watch the video for it and prepare for a wild ride. Earbuds/headset recommended)

Sludgemother

Slomosa

Halestorm

Avalone stone

The Warning

The Glorious sons

Velvet Two Stripe - favourite song is Catch 22

Servo

JPNZGRLS/Hotel Mira (name change)

Typically I have bands I like, I go to their shows and I will sometimes discover other bands by means of opening acts etc. Or I will read up about a band, see what other projects members have worked on, are affiliated with, or see what bands would play as openers to those bands.

Sometimes there’s a show with some band I don’t really know about and someone invites me along and then I might like that band, and then I have a whole new band to learn about in regards to members, openers, other projects etc. etc.

Can also do the same thing with the label a band is signed to, check out what other stuff is signed, if I like it I can do the same song and dance exploring which other music that band is linked to.

And then of course sometimes something just falls into my lap and then I just listen to that.

YouTube, I go country by country, from period to period. I even have my own favourite medieval piece of music!