#music discovery

[killjoyous]

Choices choices

[random-jot]

*New in this context meaning new to you, as opposed to brand new releases

[ultrasonicbath]

are you a death spells enjoyer who wants to find similar music but doesn't quite know where to look? if so, this playlist is for you!

nothing above, nothing below was my introduction to digital hardcore and heavy electronic music in general. this genre is so much fun to explore, but because it's a little bit ~underground~, it can be difficult to know where to start. so this playlist is meant to serve as a jumping-off point for anyone who's interested!

i tried to feature a variety of artists who capture different elements of death spells' sound and atmosphere. they span a handful of sub-genres and include a few digital hardcore pioneers of the '90s—hopefully there's something here for everyone. this isn't an exhaustive list though, and i'll probably keep tinkering with it, so let me know if you have any suggestions i didn’t add! <3

[electronicmusicandgifs]

Dancin - Aaron Smith (Kid Ghost Remix)

[art-appreciation-dog]

Ravyn Lenae 💞 Alex Isley 🟪 Ojerime 🐈‍⬛ Mereba 🖤

[amanihiphop]

This is the cover art for upcoming release "Take Me By The Hand" by Amani. On 7/7, Amani is dropping a new indie/rock track that carries an ethereal vibe and draws inspiration from Pink Floyd. Presave to get notified as soon as it hits spotify!

You can also check out more at amanihiphop.com!

[neurosismancer]

So, let me put on my Internet Old Person hat and tell you kids about the the way we committed music piracy in the long long ago of 2001, and the fragility of those music collections in those days.

You might know Napster. You might know Limewire. But there was a music piracy tool in between those. A little remembered program called AudioGalaxy, and it worked a little like Napster and a little like BitTorrent. The exact details of how it worked are immaterial, but one thing it did was when you searched for an artist, the songs were sorted, in essence, by popularity (e.g. how many people had that specific song file shared.)

Now, I can’t understand why this was a thing, but there was a strange phenomenon in the early days of file sharing and music piracy where people would share songs with the wrong artist name or song title. Certain bands and artists got a lot of stuff attributed to them that they never recorded. “Weird” Al Yankovic may be the most infamous victim of this, with nearly every novelty song and song parody released attributed to him regardless of quality or subject matter.

The confluence of these two phenomena are how I discovered one of my favorite bands of all time.

So, in my late teens, I found a new favorite band. A quickly little one-hit wonder known as DEVO. Y’know, the band that dd “Whip It.” They had the funny red hats that looked like flowerpots. Those guys.

Anyway, I had become obsessed with this band to the point of autistic hyperfixation, and I wanted to hear everything they’d ever put out. At that point, they’d released nine studio albums, a couple live albums, and two collections of early demos, and I wanted them all. So I would find myself crawling in the bottom pages of the AudioGalaxy search results looking for those obscure tracks—b-sides, songs on soundtracks and compilations, the occasional bootleg, They’d pop up between songs that were obviously not by DEVO, and much like our poor friend Alfred Yankovic, any sort of vaguely quirky 80s song got assigned to DEVO.

That was how I found it. A song called, simply, “Detachable Penis.”

Now, I had never heard of such as song, but I knew on the face of it, it wasn’t a DEVO song.

But with a title like that, I knew I had to find out just what in the name of fuck a song called “Detachable Penis” sounded like.

It sounded, dear reader, like this:

(CWs: blurry images of a dildo, the word penis, spoken word poetry)

And I immediately went to Google, because this song somehow tickled an itch in my brain, and I had to go and find out the real band that recorded this song, because how the hell else was I going to get every song I could of theirs I could get my grubby little hands on. The band was called King Missile, and I was hooked.

I’d like to see any music discovery algorithm beat that.

I eventually acquired their entire major discography along with a few EPs and B-Sides. I eventually burned those to a CD, which I could listen to with my MP3 CD Player.

And I realize, upon writing that, for you youth “MP3 CD Player” is a noun phrase that needs explaining. See, while the iPod had been released at that point, and similar devices were also on the market, they were all prohibitively expensive. The economical way to listen to pirated music files was to burn them to CD, but some CD players had software that allows you to burn those song as as _data_. Suddenly, you could have a single CD with 700 megabytes of MP3 files—room for an artist’s entire discography, if not multiple artists.

Since I was download a whole lot of MP3s with my high speed DSL connection, I was taking up an awful lot of space on my hard drive that needed to be offloaded somehow. CD-Rs and an MP3 CD Player were the optimal solution. And it worked…

…until it didn’t.

In the summer of 2002, my parents took me on a vacation to Las Vegas and Los Angeles. It was in the latter city where someone got into our rental car and swiped my MP3 CD player and a binder of CDs—both pressed CDs I’d acquired and CD-Rs of illicitly acquired MP3s, along them a CD-R I’d burned containing the nearly complete King Missile discography.

Songs I had only on that one CD-R.

It took me a decade—ten fucking years—before I’d recovered all the music that was on that disc.

This is the sort of discovery and the sort of loss that kids will never experience again in this day of Spotify and the all-you-can-eat buffet of music on demand we have now.

[winchifrost]

I'm happy to announce my music is now on Bandcamp!!!

The tracks are all pay what you want, so you can download them for free, however if you're feeling generous, this is a great way to support me!

So far "Hit Me", "BE OKAY" & "Unreliable" are on there but Mother of Pearl will be put on there Dec 17 when the album releases!

[hisgoodpuppy]

now now, i’m working on a well-thought-out & put-together corey cunningham playlist, but it’s absolutely driving me nuts that i haven’t shared these songs that make me think about him. so here…

corey listens to this daily-

“see the luck i’ve had could make a good man bad”

corey takes you for rides on his bike & this plays-

“i just don’t wanna be alone. i take your love, you take my life”

corey accidentally getting blood on you while you make out, but you like it a little too much-

do you smile when you’re up to no good?

[luciladlafuente]

Yesterday I sang my first single live for the first time! It has a lot of mistakes since it's my first time singing and dancing live but still I hope you can enjoy it :)

[cinnasheep]

alright been wondering this for a long time

when you first start listening to an artist, how do you choose to listen to songs? do you listen to albums chronologically? do you start with hits then go to deep tracks? some other way?

personally i go with a few popular tracks to see if i like them then i go to albums chronologically

[springbloggy]

Springys guide to finding new songs (spongs)

I was inspired by @pastamansta's post on finding new movies and according to my last fm account I have 24,576 scrobbles which is quite a bit. So I will give some tips on how to find new stuff as well as general tips to listening to music. Note I am more of a songs guy than an album/disography guy but I will try to give tips for that kinda stuff too.

Finding new music

Spotify

Most of my music discoveries come from spotify, so I will list tips for that first.

First, don't limit yourself to discover weekly/that weird AI DJ thing they have now. Find some more playlists to listen to! Here's ones I have saved on my discover folder, for example.

As you can see, not only do I have spotify's Discover Weekly, but I also have three based on record labels, one based on a random radio station I once found, two reddit ones (rip reddit), and one based on a music review website I like.

There's also websites that can hook into your spotify account and make your music discovery more interesting.

Skilley is a website that has sadly locked a lot of their functions behind a paywall over the years. But the functions that are still free are very good, most importantly, the search function to find new songs based on old favorites.

Obscurify is a website that checks how obscure your tastes are, then recommends a few songs based on your tastes. Pretty fun.

Radionewify is a website that claims to find new songs you haven't heard yet based on your tastes. I think its pretty accurate.

Sort your music is what I use for my discovery playlists. I like to first make things alphabetical, use sort your music to make each alphabetical playlist go from most energetic song to least, then save it all in one big playlist. Because I'm too organized for my own good.

Spotify dedup finds duplicate songs in your playlists so you never have to listen to a duplicate song ever again.

I also suggest making one playlist for your "top favorite songs" to add and remove from over time. This has helped tremendously in my discovering.

(Online) radio stations

Sometimes old school is cool! If you don't know where to start listening to radio, see if you can listen to your local college's radio station. Somehow, colleges tend to have the best stuff.

But if that isn't an option, online radio stations are your next bet. There's a ton of databases where you can search and gain a ton based on your favorite genres. A lot of them are local radio stations!

I curated a bookmarked folder of some databases/stations, so I will list some links of ones I checked out and can confirm have good stuff.

tunein | jango | accuradio | streema | radio.net | laut.fm | onlineradiobox.com | somafm

Now you may wonder "why not iheartradio/siriusxm"? I can't tell you to not listen to those, since I tend to default to iheartradio when I am doing chores and I am unsure what to listen to, but their selection tends to be extremely limited compared to the indie stations you can find online. Plus they are huge companies, so it's good to branch out and listen to the smaller stations.

Listen to some stations! You may find some songs you love, or at least have an interesting experience by the end of the day.

Youtube/Xite music

What the hell is xite music, you may ask. Well my friends xite is...vevo's app on roku. Why they renamed their app is anyone's guess. Besides iheart, when I am cleaning, and don't know what to listen to, I default to Xite and have found some good stuff from it. They tend to repeat a lot of the same songs, a ton, but also come out with the occasional surprise.

TV Shows + the shazam app

TV series writers know their BOPS. I found so many songs off of shows it's insane. Even my guilty pleasure America's got Talent got me some bops. Rarest event of all 4 of these those.

Listening Tips

Don't be afraid to admit you no longer like a song/artist/genre

As I get older, I realize I like a lot of songs/genres/artists a lot less than I did when I was younger, and that's ok! For example, I used to be really into vaporwave during 2018 - 2019, but now I can't stand most of it. I wonder why I liked it a lot of the time! There's still some vaporwave songs I still cherish, but most of it is not for me, and that's okay!

2. Don't be afraid of getting outside your comfort zone

Initially, I stuck to only indie/alternative/pop music, but decided to branch out to other genres I knew very little of and found myself surprised by how much I either liked what I found or how much influence those genres had onto other genres. Try to find music from different eras and different genres, you may like what you hear, or at least learn more about the music you do like from the experience.

3. Don't be afraid to take "music breaks"

It's okay to not listen to new music for a little while to relisten to old favorites or listen to things that aren't music such as podcasts, youtube videos, tv series, or nothing at all! Sometimes I have troubles with this mindset myself, but I found taking music breaks makes me more excited to find new music later on rather than feeling like I have to like it's my "job".

4. Spice up listening to albums to make it more fun

When discovering new albums or relisting to old favorites, find ways to spice it up to make it fun and invigorating each time. My favorite things to do are take walks, do chores, or mute a movie or tv series and see how that album syncs to what's on screen. I found it a lot more fun to listen to albums this way than to scroll mindlessly online and listen to them. Plus it helps add more perspective to the activity your doing while your listening, especially if its a movie/TV series. I am not sure how, but it helps me find little details or figure out weak spots in movies.

5. Don't be afraid of being a "songs guy" like me.

I love songs more than full discographies most of the time, and that's ok. If you find discographies tiring like I do, don't feel left out because everyone's doing tier lists and stuff. Instead share your favorite songs with others, talk about them, and maybe if you have enough songs that share an artist, then try to see if their discography is worth it. If you decide you like their hits more than their whole, that's okay! At least you gave it a decent chance, and hey, maybe some of their fans might agree.

So there you have it. Feel free to ask me if you have questions. I will try my best to answer, usually I am not this wordy, but I like songs lol.

[pseudothebeatguy]

It's time to claim your Inheritance