It’s all mostly happenstance and serendipity but I do find a lot of music by googling what I hear in the background of movies and TV. Letterkenny always has really good music and it’s always or almost always by a Canadian group that I might not otherwise encounter.

Bandcamp daily Blogs Since I listen mostly to hip hop and rappers collaborate often, features is a big part of the way I discover new music

yeah, Spotify really thinks you wanna hear the same dozen or songs on a loop. I’d love it if I could “pause” a song and keep it out of rotation for a few weeks. The AI DJ is very occasionally helpful - in between sets of the usual he’ll blast you with something out of left field.

I find it’s more useful to look at artist playlists on spotify - see what they are inspired by. As long as the band’s not too big, then it’s more what their label wants to push.

I also use Bandcamp #discover where you can browse by tags - which seems kinda oldschool now. But so far works great for me

I use a combination of Spotify discover weekly playlists, related artist lists, and lately I’ve been finding a random new category that Spotify curates and then searching for playlists of the same type that are curated by users. I think I get more deep cuts that way.

The YouTube algorithm is sometimes surprisingly good. Like “Listen to this band with 47 plays!” and then it’s a banger.

Honestly I listen to the radio, but a radio station that’s alternative and aligns with my musical tastes (www.kink.nl, a Dutch station). Stuff I like I look up, and see what’s similar on Spotify or what have been influences to them.

I mainly use metal-archives and bandcamp. On metal-archives, I mainly use the similar artists feature, and sometimes search for specific genres from specific countries.

Edit: Oh, and I totally forgot, everynoise.com is also a great resource to get surface level into new genres.

honestly the spotify algorithm is shockingly good at recommending me new music. it knows my taste inside and out. And i listen to almost every genre, but have my specific preferences to every genre. Been on the same account for like 10 years so spotify knows me pretty well by now

everynoise.com is pretty great, though it hasn’t kept up with the absolute most recent sub genres lately. Still fantastic, though. Connects with Spotify - which I use.

I’ve discovered more music new to me on Radio Paradise the last few years than anywhere else. They stream up to FLAC quality so an excellent choice for listening on the home stereo. https://radioparadise.com/home

Spotify’s discovery algorithm is great. Outside of that I routinely check Pitchfork for new albums. theneedledrop makes good recs too and Any Decent Music is a pretty decent music review aggregator similar to Metacritic but for more niche styles.

These days I listen to a lot of dance music though, so I tend to discover music via DJ mixes on Soundcloud and Bandcamp. Their Bandcamp Weekly section is pretty great and you can easily find music by browsing record labels, people’s collections or the “if you like x” recommendations listed at the bottom of individual release pages.

Used to be what.cd

Now it’s just hopes and prayers

I find the Tidal algorithm to be excellent. Beyond that I think a good trick is checking out different services. Playing the same artist or song radio on Spotify will be a very different experience to Pandora or YouTube Music or again Tidal. That and a few of them actually have a ‘discovery’, or whatever they call it, setting on the radio that will specifically recommend things that are new and/or unexpected.

BrooklynVegan

Certainly skews towards specific tastes and genres [indie, punk, diy, and sometimes undergroud hip-hop], but super active and on top of new music and related info

I follow the news portion as well, but for pure new music discovery: https://www.brooklynvegan.com/tags/new-songs/?from=trending

last.fm has awesome algorithms.