I let YouTube’s algorithm make me discover bands then listen to their albums

I watch a new anime and the op/ed is a banger

I quaff the grape’s nectar and doth play diverse melodies from Spotify until I chance upon a tune that pleases me.

I don’t think I ever found music. the music tended to find me.

Spotify radio mode

Honestly I mostly pull from the soundtracks in whatever I watch. Also Eurovision.

Start with an artist I already like, find out who inspired them and who they inspired, listen to them, repeat

Found a good blog called Hearing Things been a couple of good things off that.

And KEXP!! Radio out of Seattle, has an app too.

I buy music on bandcamp. I check out other suggested artists from the music I’ve bought on bandcamp. I check out bandcamp dailys. I read a couple of music blogs. I look into artists who are touring with artists I already like. I look into the record labels of artists I like. That sort of stuff.

Year-end best of lists. Allmusic, pitchfork, and whatever other sites come out with best of year rankings.

I spent about 20 years getting stuck in the past while the culture got away from me; I just hadn’t got into any bands since the early 2000s, and it was getting pretty sad.

I also have pretty bad ADHD - music fucks up my ability to concentrate on language-based tasks, so I can’t just play stuff in the background while I do something else - and sitting there staring through multiple songs in a row just isn’t going to happen.

So I had a great idea: turn it into a game.

I nuked my youtube data completely, started again from scratch, and set out, not so much to discover new music, but to train the algorithm to fetch me cool stuff. How well can I nudge the thing into a model of stuff I tend to like?

• Open the home feed, and start going through it
• Reaction videos, influencers, other garbage, hit don’t recommend channel.
• Any music videos, open in new tab
• Rinse and repeat until I have a ridiculous number of tabs open
• Go through each tab:
• Skip through representative chunks of song, get at least 20 seconds of music in before making a decision
• If you just don’t like it, close the tab and move on.
• If you do like it:
• If it’s not posted by the original artist account, go find the original instead if possible.
• Hit like
• Save to playlists for whatever genres it seems to fit, plus a catch-all list (set public, for reasons I’ll explain)
• Open a few new tabs off the sidebar
• If you find three solid bangers from one artist, subscribe.
• When you run out of tabs, refresh the home feed.

It’s adjustable to suit my attention span at the time - if I need the dopamine I just skim more, if I want to chill I let it play longer.

It fits into spare minutes of downtime at work etc.

I have discovered SO MUCH amazing new music, and my tastes have expanded in all kinds of directions. I’ve started not only recognizing but actually having opinions on bands I see on posters as I walk down the street, which is just plain ridiculous for me.

I have gone down some weird and amazing rabbit holes, from Armenian music to Femtanyl.

Probably the best thing I’ve ever done, srsly.

Sometimes the algorithm can get stale, and you end up with a streak of bland, safe stuff that all seems the same.

When this happens, find one of the many third-party playlist-shuffle sites (because the built-in shuffle is still horribly broken), and feed it either your main playlist or some of the genre-specific ones you feel aren’t getting enough love, and listen through a bunch of songs there to dredge up the silt. (you may need to open them in separate tabs; the embed doesn’t always update your watch history properly). And this is why the lists need to be public, so third-party sites can browse your playlists.

I’m mainly interested in old time fiddle tunes. I get them from youtube recommends sometimes, or from going to jams and hearing a cool tune, or someone I play with wants to learn a tune. I often post tunes I like on my old-time music lemmy community.

Oh, since it’s on topic, can you fellow lemmings recommend some music for me?

Bandcamp and Sputnik Music have been doing so since I was in school over a decade ago.

Bandcamp mostly. They do writeups sometimes like “the best metal from Colorado” or “a deep dive into acid jazz”. They seem to be human written too and not ai slop, at least in the past.

Also seeing who’s playing with who. If I like band A, and band B is opening for them, well I’ll check out band B. I saw “Year of the Cobra” play with “The Well” and it was a good show, and I bought their album.