Given we all live in a decidedly niche music sphere, I thought it might be helpful if we share our tips/tricks for finding new artists. Here’s my tried and true: everynoise.com
I’ve been using the custom chart function at https://rateyourmusic.com/ recently. It allows me to drill down to highly specific combinations of genres, influences and descriptors, such as “instrumental noise rock influenced by krautrock” or “noisy avant-prog influenced by post-punk”. Back in the day I discovered a lot of new music from obscure internet radio stations. Recommendation algorithms however have never worked for me, they usually just recommend stuff I already know.
That level of specificity is exactly what I’m looking for!
+1 on using RYM. It’s been perfect for custom charts, even filtering by year/decade.
https://www.music-map.com/ can help a bit. It knows surprisingly underground bands.
Random browsing on Bandcamp can produce results too.
This is cool and helpful, thank you for sharing
I’ve found a bunch of good stuff through there, it’s such a cool tool!
Never heard of music map, I`ll check that out!
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Ooo thanks for reminding me about Metal Archives… are they still a bit elitist? I seem to recall them being opposed to anything vaguely metalcore.
Yes, very elitist. But then again they have basically everything on there so in the list of similar artists you can find something tiny you simply won’t find any other way.
As lame as it is, YouTube and word of mouth.
As much as I hate Google, YouTube’s discovery suggestions usually work for me. Offline, one of my high school buddies fronts a sludge/stoner metal band but is one of those deep diving metalheads that’s always checking out new stuff. He’ll send me links, or come by with a cd or thumb drive of stuff to listen to while we fart around. That’s pretty much it lol
I’m glad you asked this question, I’ve stagnated on my music discovery lately.
I’ve been a broken blob since a few months before COVID, and it’s been hard to get back to being myself, but I used to discover things through the live music scene. This isn’t practical advice though, because I was aware of what was going on because I was a drummer without a band, but a willingness to sub in whenever it was convenient. So many bands are desperate for a drummer that they’ll even take a mediocre one like me. It meant I got to play alongside and hang out with some really good bands (as well as some shit ones, but the live scene do be like that)
Accidently from memes, nowadays (sadly). I found out about Simpsonwave and Phonk that way and the latest that I found out was this trio of retired Englishmen who decided to start do freestyle hip hop music on their spare time. While I am more of the “milk from a dirty glass” -kind of lifestyle of a person, I like the attitude behind those filfthy lyrics and how they break age norms. The trio is called The Northern Boys and I would say Party Time is a good song to start 🤣
YouTube was a major source for me, before they did something with their algorithm and how they messed up search function by adding more recommended and promoted content rather than show only the actual results. I love to find good music videos. Like Felix Colgrave made a really cool music video for Fever The Ghost’s song SOURCE.
I vividly remember the days when Youtube’s algorithm would knock it out of the park with its suggestions. Nothing to date has ever been as good as theirs was.
I find last.fm is second-to-none for finding personal recommendations. Beyond that, I like to keep up to date with all the top prog albums on RateYourMusic, SputnikMusic, Metalstorm, and Progarchives - I won’t love everything but it’s a good way to find newly released gems.
Do you scrobble your listenings? I used to be all about that but it feels much harder in the age of music streaming.
I just have it synced up to spotify. I love crunching numbers so I don’t mind deleting the odd extra scrobble or reconnecting spotify when it disconnects (happens annoyingly often) so I can have as accurate stats as possible. It’s also really great for nostalgia. I’ve had it for six years now and it’s great to go back and see what the top albums were I was vibing to several summers ago and stuff like that.
It really is great for nostalgia. I should get back on the wagon; I’m so glad to have my college listening records.
I still do it. I actually just switched to iPhone recently and found out it was hard to scrobble from. I switched-out LMS with Navidrome so I could scrobble from the server instead of the phone. XD
i usually find stuff on spotify, whether it’s recommended artists, similar artists. or finding a prog metal playlist and just listening
I have bad luck with spotify’s recommendations, except the discovery weekly playlist. I do find a lot through that though
I use angrymetalguy.com and spotify reccomended artists on band pages.
A sort of cool resource is Gnoosic, though the recommendations can be a bit weird at times.
That’s been my experience too. It never works quite how I want it to, but the three-artist system is nice in that it makes it easy to play around with your inputs systematically.
The link doesn’t work for me, is it the same as everynoise.com?
I’ve been mostly using Spotify and some Dutch review sites. I still have a Last.fm account but don’t use it much anymore, Spotify has mostly replaced it.
I’m considering switching back to Spotify for just that reason. I jumped over to Tidal a few years back as they pay artists more, but their recommendation algorithms are garbage in comparison.
Huh, never heard of everynoise, seems cool but a bit weird considering it just gives you like 200 names
IIRC, there’s some sort of algorithm working under the hood that procedurally generates genres/categories. I could be wrong though, it’s been a really long time since I read into it.
Ok i get it now, i didnt realize i had to press scan to start i just searched for progmetal and it showed me a bunch of names. didnt realize it was like interactive
I have two strategies I use interchangeably.
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Pick a song (not artist) you want to listen to, and use the “radio” option for that song. The first 10-20 tracks are almost always bands you already know/listen to, but if you shuffle it, pretty soon you’ll be hearing bands that aren’t in your rotation. When you like one, go to that artist and queue up some of their popular songs to see if it’s your jam!
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Whenever I’m going to a concert, I look up all the openers setlists on setlist.fm and make a spotify playlist of at least half of those songs, usually the ones with the most plays. That way I have at least heard 3-4 songs they might play so I can get into them a little, but also, I know if they’re worth skipping or not!
Honestly, this is how I’ve discovered almost all the “new” music I listen to. This is how I found out Amity Affliction was still a band (hadn’t listened to them since at least 2012) and had a BANGER album just release. It’s how I found out about Make them Suffer, Bad Omens, Lorna Shore, Currents, Ballyhoo!, the Midnight, Siamese, and TONS of other bands I listen to regularly now!
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I usually try to just look around on websites like https://rateyourmusic.com for albums with appealing genre tags, but nowadays it’s really hard to find something captivating there. Now, I’m mostly reading music reviews of new albums that come out and sometimes ask for a recommendation from my friends and fellow music listeners that I stumble across online. That’s how it’s been for the past four years now, basically.
If this gets traction, maybe we could sticky it?
Ok i did sticky it now, just to have it incase someone wants to find this
Awesome! I hope people find it useful.
I dont mind, but i have no idea how haha
edit: ok just figured out how to, if you want ill sticky it
I just go on a fleemarket and buy random cds.
That’s fun, I don’t think we’ve had flea markets here since I was a kid.
