Bamdcamp daily, people i follow on bandcamp, warez websites and features and collaborations

I do it by playing the long game.

Back in 2007 I embarked on a three year radio production degree, and the costs associated with that, all so I could start my own radio show 18 years later where I get people to suggest songs and I play them. And many of them I’ve never heard of.

I can recomend moderated Internet-/DAB-Radio like “egoFM”, “ParadiseRadio”, or “byteFM”.
https://feddit.org/post/16991458

Or Bands of Newcomerfestivals like “Ab geht die Lutzi”, “Tollwood”, or whatever is near to you.

Instead of YT you can use NewPipe, or freeTube, or a good add-blocker.

I go through my kids’ playlists.

I ask friends and family to make me mix CDs instead of giving gifts.

I listen to local independent radio (Chirp in my case).

I carpool with coworkers sometimes and have them run the aux.

I ask people to tell me what their favorite song is.

I go to concerts early enough to see the opening acts, even if I’ve never heard of them.

And I participate in threads like this.

Bandcamp new and notable

Bands I like touring with other bands

Record labels I like put out new stuff

From shows I watch and games I play. I don’t really go out of my way to search for music. If I find something interesting, it’s usually on YouTube.

https://www.music-map.com/

You type in an artist and it gives you a visual map of related artists. The artist you searched for is in the middle and the further you go out from that, the less similar the artists are.

NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert is another one. You’re discovering artists at random but I’ve found some bangers that way.

• Blogs/sites like Pitchfork for internationally hyped releases
• Smaller sites for more local content
• I check local calendars for release parties or concerts
• I talk with my colleagues.
• I go directly to labels that I trust and check out all of their new releases
• I stop by my local record stores and ask the staff for a couple of album recs
• I use the search functions of Bandcamp and follow a bunch of bands there
• Ditto for Soundcloud, where the reposts of independent artists are especially useful for discovering other bands and musicians.
• Recommendations from Qobuz or Spotify
• I have a couple of radio stations that I spend a few hours with each week, like fip.fr, local student radio, local insert political leanings radio

I take the brute approach: get music packs bundling all releases for a day, load the albums into a lightweight player, filtered by genre. Anything sounding nice results in a beet import.

Two great blogs I’ve found through Mastodon:

• https://nham.co.uk/
• https://www.etherdiver.com/category/other-peoples-music/

Both blogs have an RSS feed, and they post on Mastodon when a new article is up. Those two have accounted for almost everything I’ve bought on Bandcamp recently. Mastodon in general, and the #bandcampfriday hashtag, are great sources.

I also started buying physical media lately. Lemme tell ya, the guy behind the counter at the record store knows everything. EVERYTHING. All bands. Who toured with whom. He is the human scrobbler. Get to know him.

spotify discover weekly. its been so finely tuned over the years that 90% of them are at least put in my liked playlist, and maybe 50% into my favorites playlist

i used to follow this “greatest _____ album” tournement thing on facebook, but stopped doing that because i dont use facebook anymore

you can also do the 1001albumsgenerator, which will give you a random album a day from the book “1001 albums you must hear before you die”

Music Brainz or ListenBrainz.

Occasionally I get on WhoSampled and look into the source material of some songs.

A mix of BBC radio 6 and recommendations from my cousin who works in the music industry. I can’t give you my cousin’s details, but radio 6 has a great range of music from some of the DJs.

I tend to follow bands and musicians I like and check out who else they play music with.

e.g. I go to their shows and if I like the the other bands playing I tend to check them out later and buy their music on Bandcamp. Then from there I’ll also follow the socials of all those bands so when they mention other bands, or if they’re going on tour with other bands, or playing music fests with other bands, then I check out those bands too.

I hate social media / Instagram but every once in a while the algorithm will mention something worth checking out, kind of rare but it happens.

Seems to work for me, if anything now I have too much music to check out and not enough time to listen to it all haha.

Half of the time it’s just yt recommendations since I don’t get genAI slop auto thrown at me while listening to vocaloid/utau songs since they probably already categorize it as genAI despite it being in a weird gray area. It’s the closest you can get to ethical genAI¹ music, especially since you still got to put in a lot of work yourself.

From there I sometimes look through the producers channel if it’s their official channel and not some rando uploading a NicoNico/BiliBili/wherever exclusive song. If something really catches my eye, I have a good chance of clicking to try it.

¹ programs like Diffsinger and the latest vocaloid voicebanks use AI but not in a suno kind of way. Consenting people using their voices for these VBs, though harder to say if consentual for DF because anyone can make one. Latest vocaloid VBs went back to what was originally done in the first VBs in the mid-late 2000s: using machine learning

Edit:

I also find stuff through CDs I find at thrift stores and a nearby CD shop. Again, whatever catches my eye.