I especially hate how the curating institutions are so dominated by English and Amerikan artists.
I’ve found the YouTube algorithm pretty good for finding new stuff (done pretty well at recommending post-punk stuff to me recently), but also radio stations. Most of the good ones are online, but BBC 6music has some really good shows for discovering both new bands and older stuff you never ran into. Iggy Pop goes for particularly deep cuts of niche genres, so tends to be interesting even if you’re never going to listen to any of it again.
It’s actually never been easier to find new and fantastic music, you just need to know where to look, here’s where I go digging when I feel the need to:
1 Music Labels on Bandcamp There’s been an explosion of fantastic music labels over the last few decades, often specializing in reissues of forgotten classics and music from the global south, here are a few that I like, with a lot of them selling their stuff on bandcamp:
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Light in the Attic Records, who do stuff from classic japanese ambient releases to forgotten soul classics from the early 70s (both of these albums are absolutely fantastic and come highly recommended by me)
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Habibi Funk, who de reissues and new releases from everywhere in the arab world Analog Africa, who deliver the hottest dance tunes from all over africa from fifty years ago
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Music from Memory who do absolutely fantastically curated reissues of anything between pop (<this one is another absolute fav of mine) and ambient and experimental
This is just a small selection of stuff I am into and my interests are admittedly fairly narrow, but you can do this for every genre you like. Just pick a band/an album you love, look up what label it was released under and look up that label (you can also use discogs or rateyourmusic for this if the label isn’t active anymore/their website sucks).
2 Internet Radio
Now I don’t listen to as much of this as I probably should, but there are great radios out there, but if you wanna be really hip you should listen to NTS who have in the past done tons of collabs with famous musicians and have tons of DJs who play weekly programs.
Now this website is definitely full of stupid nerds, but if you are looking for popular and famous releases in specific decades, genres or countries I don’t know of a better place to look for them. As soon as you go to actually lesser known music it sucks, but if you want a good overview of a specific genre or decade of music you will get it there (if obviously with a heavy internet-music-nerd bias).
Now this is already more good music than you could ever hope to listen in a lifetime, so you could also just do what I do, which really is the only sensible thing left to do, which is to solely listen to the Beach Boys and Beach Boys bootlegs.
I love soundway records. I’ve been onto them for years. Compilations do have their issues though. For one, there’s a bottleneck, I’ve found it difficult to click through to get individual projects from featured artists. Secondly, sometimes when you do get through it sounds different which raises another issue: did the medium become the message? Are these labels simply marketing existing music to a new market or is the content changed in its commodification. The rift between how absent the accordion is on these projects compared to it’s historical prominence is just one example of how that might play out.
I guess one of the paradoxes is I want music to listen to offline but all methods require being yet more online.
There are definitely tons of issues with the whole reissue/comp scene and with how all media is distributed in our digital age of cultural overproduction. Compilations are pre-selected for you and can only ever offer you a shallower, but wider look at whatever they are compiling, be it a genre, a specific time and place or just a specific band.
did the medium become the message?
The medium has always been the message. In the broader picture there’s barely a difference if you were to somehow find an old authentic vinyl in a record store of afrobeat from 70s ghana or just get a comp of the same music from bandcamp. The music is just as dead (or let’s say non-alive) either way and the only time it truly was alive was in the 70s in ghana when they were playing it, when there was even a tiny chance of it being more than just a commodity.
I guess one of the paradoxes is I want music to listen to offline but all methods require being yet more online.
I’ve recently downloaded a whole bunch of my spotify library with the intent to delete my account there. My problem with spotify isn’t that it is bad (its algorithm has actually been fantastic at recommending old and new and often obscure music to me and it is obviously very convenient) or that it is bad for the artists (my alternative is piracy not buying albums, i don’t have any money), but there is just something about it that cheapens the whole thing, that takes the soul out of it. Having every album ever (or at least a pretty large amount of them) right next to each other just do them justice at all.
But obviously downloading music doesn’t magically put the soul back into the music either. Like recently I’ve kinda gotten into Miles Davis. And he’s got a giant discography full of fantastic records. And there’s probably very rarely been an artist that had as long and as interesting an artistic development than him, starting in the early 50s and ending in the late 70s. And how much of that gets lost when you just have all the albums as mp3s on your computer, the little icons right next to each other? You cannot possibly give any of these albums the time and attention they deserve and that they got back in the day.
I dunno. I might do a longer post on this, but I really feel like there’s something deeply wrong with music as a medium today and spotify and the internet are certainly only a part of it.
Some music communities are better for this than others. Metal has a million resources and people from all over the world. You can get like blogs, podcasts, archives of bands, relationship charts, theory books. People (outside of Reddit) will give you a bunch of generally good recommendations.
Meanwhile classical is basically locked behind randomly cruising YouTube, looking for old LP records at higher-end music shops, and music education.
Any sort of folk music has basically nothing unless you specifically live in the place that folk music is from.
I like '80s/'90s synthy new age music and that’s got basically nothing outside RYM and whatever Vaporwave artists are sampling, or if it’s a side project of someone who became a movie or game music composer.
it’s 2024, no one is forcing you to listen to the mainstrem. there are so many choices out there, youtube and soundcloud still has great new stuff and non-anglo too. the streaming services however are the worst. with translation apps and stuff the world is your oyster. don’t forget soulseek too. check out the album ‘dunya’ by Mustafa for something a little different, still English though.
I actually recently got into the habit to listening to old NPR tiny desk concerts episodes on YouTube during Work or shorter drives. Discovered quite a few artists I normally would never have listened to. But sadly it is limited to a bunch of genres, so no stuff like metall, etc
