I started listening to NTS after seeing a video essay where a dude recommended them. Also for the past few weeks I’ve been co-facilitating the Music Appreciation group where I volunteer, so members keep suggesting bands that are new to me who I then check out.
Another way I find music is through TikTok. I have mixed feelings about the platform overall but its past as musical.ly means there’s still a lot of music use in its dna.
For instance, yesterday I found this song on a sub-300 liked video that the song’s artist posted, and it’s one of my favorite things I’ve found this year.
A relatively new way that I am discovering new music is just listening to whatever is on at the gym each morning. I don’t take my own headset or music, and they have a setup where anyone can put in requests. I hear a lot of different music this way.
Some of it is terrible, some of it is funny, and some of it gets added to my Apple Music catalog when I leave.
I listen to Enn! Tee! Ess! (NTS Radio) and also follow various music Bluesky accounts, participate in polls and such. One current poll is Black Pop History 1982-85 ( @peoples-pop-polls.bsky.social on Bluesky ) - OK, that’s not new but you’d have to be pretty knowledgeable not to discover something new to you.
I have over 10,000 songs saved to my master playlist on YouTube Music, so at this point they do a pretty good job guessing what my tastes are and what stuff I might be into so I find a lot of new or new-to-me stuff just through letting them shuffle through music after a song or album and making note of stuff I like to explore more. I also use their autogenerated playlists in genres that I know I really like, and try to take notice of stuff being talked about by people whose tastes I’ve come to trust on social media. Finally I read a lot of Wikipedia articles about genres I like when it comes to older but new-to-me music and see what artists they talk about as important on there that I haven’t dug into yet.
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I follow artists on Bandcamp, do tag searches, and generally fall down rabbit holes on YouTube and my music streaming platforms (I’m on TIDAL).
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For me word of mouth is #1, having friends that have good taste and know my taste is the best
Alongside that going to shows or festivals without knowing the bands and just see what you vibe with, I’ll often connect to music much more if I hear it live, found a lot of bands this year from taking a chance on them and loving the energy.
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This is awesome I can finally figure out what anyone means when they say any music genre now
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2024-01-05 status update: With my 2023-12-04 layoff from Spotify I lost the internal data-access required for ongoing updates to many parts of this site. Most of this, as a result, is now a static snapshot of what, for now, will be the final state from the site’s 10-year history and evolution
Ugh, it’s so unfortunate that it’s dormant.
But a great bookmark nonetheless, especially for exploring uncharted territory!
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Thats why we can’t have nice things 
Is your quote from the Refused song or am I ignorant to another potential influence or use of it?
We pay just $3 a month for SiriusXM and I pretty much only listen to the metal station and they soooooometimes play songs that aren’t Lorna Shore or fucking Avatar
Yep haha, love that song
I find most of the music I listen to by navigating tags on Bandcamp. It’s not really easy to do but you can mess with the URL to make your own search engine and find some people autodeterminating themself in some different genre. It’s nice and you can find some really niche stuff. Sometime you can find label pages and so it’s a jackpot of new people creative composer to listen to.
I still use Youtube and check the channels of people uploading singles from people. From time to time they just have a bunch of cool songs.
Also I navigate a lot on Free Music Archive, I do the trick of going to the Top All Time and then go to the last page and listen to the no listened tracks 
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Community radio, I refresh their websites when they update their weekly playlists and tune into their morning and drive programming when I drive to and from work. Playlists are often saved online.
I also have shows that I tune into regularly, some are hosted online after their airing.
In Sydney, where I live this amounts to 2SER and FBi, I’m also a paid subscriber which I find incentivised me to place more importance in listening frequently and supporting the creation of this content.
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I play a new (or old) videogame, and then get obsessed with its soundtrack for a few weeks.
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A local place which shut down recently had a deal where you could grab 20 cassettes for 20 dollars, and I loved going there every month to pick up another copy the same two Genesis albums that I forgot I had picked up last month along with 17-18 or so more cassettes of whatever caught my eyes or felt like something I would never have listened to otherwise.
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oh man, that sounds like an awesome deal
I finally cancelled my Spotify sub recently, partly for financial reasons and partly because of, you know, The Evil. I want to get a cheap CD player and start rebuilding an actual record collection, because apparently second-hand CDs are actually cheaper than chips these days.
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cheap cassettes are the coolest stuff ever to find obscure music
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Gnoosic has been around for a long time, it learns from user input (Akinator style) to recommend you music that is popular with people with similar taste.
The website author has branched out into all kinds of things now, movies, books etc