Music Brainz or ListenBrainz.

Occasionally I get on WhoSampled and look into the source material of some songs.

Pandora has a vastly better “radio” mode, it’s pretty intelligent about related songs.

https://krvm.org/ Radio station in Eugene OR (USA). Lots of new music during their daytime hours, specialty music in their evenings (recorded, available for two weeks). If you like, please support!

https://www.music-map.com/

You type in an artist and it gives you a visual map of related artists. The artist you searched for is in the middle and the further you go out from that, the less similar the artists are.

NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert is another one. You’re discovering artists at random but I’ve found some bangers that way.

Bamdcamp daily, people i follow on bandcamp, warez websites and features and collaborations

Radio.garden is a website that lets you move a map around and connect to online radio stations all over the planet.

Occasionally I go on there and just start scrolling around and listening to a bunch of different stuff to see what’s playing.

About two years ago, I encountered Marius Ziska’s cover of Naeveran, I know it’s like well over a decade old, but it was new to me. It was amazing. And I never would have found it had not been on radio garden.

• Blogs/sites like Pitchfork for internationally hyped releases
• Smaller sites for more local content
• I check local calendars for release parties or concerts
• I talk with my colleagues.
• I go directly to labels that I trust and check out all of their new releases
• I stop by my local record stores and ask the staff for a couple of album recs
• I use the search functions of Bandcamp and follow a bunch of bands there
• Ditto for Soundcloud, where the reposts of independent artists are especially useful for discovering other bands and musicians.
• Recommendations from Qobuz or Spotify
• I have a couple of radio stations that I spend a few hours with each week, like fip.fr, local student radio, local insert political leanings radio

Spotify recommendations.

I go through my kids’ playlists.

I ask friends and family to make me mix CDs instead of giving gifts.

I listen to local independent radio (Chirp in my case).

I carpool with coworkers sometimes and have them run the aux.

I ask people to tell me what their favorite song is.

I go to concerts early enough to see the opening acts, even if I’ve never heard of them.

And I participate in threads like this.

I’ve picked up quote a few new (to me) artists and songs via streaming shows. One that stands out is Netflix’s DARK, the montage soundtrack for which is utterly superb and almost none of which I knew before.

I tend to follow bands and musicians I like and check out who else they play music with.

e.g. I go to their shows and if I like the the other bands playing I tend to check them out later and buy their music on Bandcamp. Then from there I’ll also follow the socials of all those bands so when they mention other bands, or if they’re going on tour with other bands, or playing music fests with other bands, then I check out those bands too.

I hate social media / Instagram but every once in a while the algorithm will mention something worth checking out, kind of rare but it happens.

Seems to work for me, if anything now I have too much music to check out and not enough time to listen to all of it haha.

I work in a small (450 capacity) live music venue. We have a great booker who books a very broad spectrum of up and coming bands as well as older bands still touring.

If you have cool small venues in your area, most of them have a certain style, just regularly check out their program on their website, there you’ll have links to videos, the bands socials and if you happen to like some of the music you already know when and where they’ll play a live show :)

Pretty randomly. I’m very picky about what I listen to, I’m very reluctant to listen to stuff recommended by my friends etc. I mostly stumble upon new stuff. Either I hear a cool song on a tv-show, like Golden Brown by The Stranglers in Clarksons Farm, or a collaboration with a artist that I already listen to, like happened when I found out about Têtes Raides through Yann Tiersen.

But me being weird about how and when I find music is a pretty pointless thing to talk about since I think most people don’t do things the way I do. I’d recommend making a Last.fm account. Not only does it make lists of what you listen to, it has that “similar artists” thing. I use it mostly to have a list of stuff I’ve listened to, because I like lists. My last.fm account is the oldest account I have (now that google doesn’t let me use my gmail anymore lol), I’ve had it since 2005. Its pretty fun to go check what I listened to in February 2007 or something. I can see where my teenage relationship breakups were, based on HIM being the most listened to artist of a month lol

Mostly digging through past albums of bands I already like. My music taste has mostly fossilized, but I realize that the artists I claim to enjoy, I’ve rarely explored their whole discography. So I try to do that. And when I feel like I’ve exhausted favorites, there are plenty of not-quite-favorites to give a deeper look at.

So I’m not looking for new groups too often. But when I am, these resources are useful:

• https://everynoise.com/engenremap.html
• https://www.gnoosic.com/ -Wikipedia (just looking at genre pages, or other bands that members of my favorite groups have been in or toured with, or super groups, etc)
• https://www.metal-archives.com/
• Pandora (used to be pretty good, but I haven’t used it much recently so idk)

YouTube, Qobuz (human curated recommendations) and Lemmy/PieFed