New Music Discovery 101

Finding new music used to be as easy as turning on MTV2. Now it can seem daunting... at least to find the good stuff. Where do you start when you haven't been keeping up for years?

One of the complaints I hear most often when I recommend new music is “I don’t know where to find any of this stuff on my own.”

When we were kids, it seemed like everything was curated and manageable — we had MTV, magazines, local radio stations that had some variety before they were all assimilated by Clear Channel, and mixtapes passed around between friends. The world of good music was always vast, but we had lodestars to guide our way.

Now, streaming has made that vast world seemingly infinite. Radio stations are either playing the same songs that we were listening to thirty years ago or homogenous, indistinguishable pop. Print is dead (or so they say) and there are so many music review websites, blogs, YouTube & TikTok channels, and newsletters devoted to reviewing or promoting music, that it’s hard to sift through the noise (honestly, they'll let just anybody start writing these days… *cough*).

In a time when music is more accessible than ever, both to create and consume, I get how it can feel more overwhelming than exciting. When there are almost as many outlets telling you about new music as there are new releases, where are you supposed to start?

Well, I have good news and bad news.

The bad news is, you’ll never feel truly on top of everything that’s coming out. If you’re a completionist and your goal is to listen to every single album deemed worth listening to by the people who get to decide that sort of thing (and didn’t we just say that they’ll let any credential-less nobody throw their opinion around? Psh!), you’ll get nothing else done and take all the joy out of the process to boot. Forget about it; there’s no such thing as zero inbox for new music.

The good news is that I have lots of suggestions, which I’ll go through below. Better still, they aren’t a step-by-step guide. If you pick just one (okay fine — maybe a combination of two) of these as an inroad to music discovery, you’ll get a good sense of what’s out there (at least in the “mainstream indie” world, if you pardon the oxymoronic nomenclature) and what you might like.

Now that we have that settled, shall we dig in?

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#1 Follow the aggregators

Tracking new release calendars can be a slog and is useful only up to a point. Sure, it’s nice to know what’s coming out soon, but if your biggest issue is that you haven’t heard of most of these artists in the first place, it might be better to wait on the other end of this particular production line, where everything has already been sorted, digested, processed, and tabulated by the Pitchforks and Stereogums of the world to let you know what’s what.

My go-tos are Metacritic and Album of the Year, but there are others that I find a bit clunkier to navigate, like Rate Your Music and AllMusic. These sites crawl music ratings from every publication where new albums are reviewed, and averages out the scores. You can sort and filter to (most of) your liking. Most include genres, which I especially appreciate when deciding what to listen to next.

Clockwise from top left, a poorly cropped interface visual of Metacritic, AOTY, RYM, and AllMusic

#2 Train your algorithm

You’re probably already paying for a streaming service. You’ve also probably complained at one time or another about how soulless algorithmic music recommendations are. I feel your pain, I truly do, but I also have a slightly embarrassing confession — I really like Spotify’s algorithm.

Probably a solid half of the new bands I recommend over on my Tik Tok channel came from one of Spotify’s automatically generated playlists tailored to my tastes. Scandalous, I know! But it’s the result of over a decade of manipulating the app to give me what I want, and you can do the same (in much less time, I’m sure).

This is a little bit of a chicken/egg problem, because if you want to hear new music, you have to play new music. Spotify (and I assume other streaming platforms, but this is the one I use most) is best at serving up similar music to what you’re already playing, almost to a fault. If you’re cranking your ‘90s jams over and over, it’s unlikely to tell you about new bands that sound similar, but it will give you lots of other era appropriate artists you may have forgotten about.

Here’s my favorite trick to show Spotify who’s boss:

Make a playlist, even a very small one, of the new songs you know that you already like. If you don’t know where to start, steal some of the songs off one of my playlists. Spotify will start offering up “Recommended Songs” at the bottom of the screen — all on theme, all of the same era.

Songs Spotify recommends on my “Witchy Disco” playlist. You can play the songs before adding them to the playlist and hammer the refresh button until you’re satisfied.

Once you discover someone you like, poke around the artist’s page. See if they have any playlists, either that they made themselves or that they feature on. You never know where the rabbit hole might lead.

Of course, once you’re listening to enough new music, all of the recommendations you get will improve. You just have to be sure to hit “follow” on the artists’ pages you enjoy and actively listen to them once in a while.