Yoooo

I am going through a crazy music discovery phase, I am like a child at an all you can eat buffet. I want to share some tools that I have been using to consistently find some really good music. My main issue with a lot of traditional disovery methods eg. Reddit, youtube, spotify algorithim is that the popular stuff rises to the top. But I know that there are amazing artists within the genres I like that will not have a massive following. These websites have helped me really narrow down what I like and also find some awesome shit in niches.

NTS

NTS offers music discovery in a really unique way, they offer endless mixtapes where they display their own select choice of music within a genre. Often genres are blended and there are no hard and fast rules. For example, thrash, punk, heavy metal, death metal and heavy rock will all be bundled together. This works for me as I do just want to throw my head up and down but similarly it works really well for genres such as hip hop that have close cousins in Funk, Jazz, Disco and RnB.

Hearing Things

A subscription based music journo site, this is the brain child of an ex pitchfork employee. They have a great variety in taste and honestly bring to light some awesome underground and less popular artists. I have found some absolute gems in the rough with this publication.

Finally, Music labels.

I don't know how this went over my head. But music labels, or at least independant music labels. Often only produce music that has a very similar vibe and sound. So if you like a certain band, check out what label they are signed with and often you will be overwhelmed with the options that are all a similar vibe. This is a huge hack for me, especially with metal bands as one of the main issues with metal bands is they have the craziest names. So stumbling into them is often very difficult. But by looking into their label you can find a bunch of really similar sounds super quick!