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.

#3 Don’t forget about record labels

Twenty years ago, one of my favorite ways to find new music was scouring the rosters of my favorite record labels. I spent a lot of time on websites for Saddle Creek, Jade Tree, Kill Rock Stars, Matador, and Sub Pop¹, writing down every band I could find, then switching over to my college intranet to see if any of my schoolmates had ripped their CDs into mp3s. It was a goddamn treasure trove.

There’s no reason not to do the exact same thing now, just minus the cumbersome downloading. Every time you’re enjoying a new album, take a minute to look up the label. Chances are you’ll enjoy a good bit of the catalogue.

Here’s a very quick sampling of some of my favorites:

• Born Loser (Pouty, Sofia Bolt)

• Topshelf (Ekko Astral, Ratboys)

• Royal Mountain (Ducks LTD, U.S. Girls)

• City Slang (SPRINTS, King Hannah, White Denim)

#4 Go outside

Okay, I know — outside is terrible. It’s hot, or it’s cold, and there are people out there, and it costs money for some reason. But sometimes it can be fun to pretend that you’re still a dewy youth with hydrated intervertebral discs who can stay out past 10pm and stand upright at a concert for several hours at a time like it’s nothing at all.

Sorry… where were we?

Go to shows occasionally! Get there early and see the opening band you’ve never heard of. Check out a music festival and go support one of the undercard that nobody is crowding around for. Bonus: they’re usually on much earlier in the day.

Another thing you can do is just flip through the posters for major music festivals, whether or not you plan on going. Here’s one I actually did go to (finally!), but you’ll see the same bands pop up everywhere. If they’re touring, it usually means they’ve released music recently. And if you like the headliners, chances are you’ll like the undercard, too.

#5 Always scan your environment

One thing I don’t miss about the pre-internet-ubiquity days is not being able to look up every song the second you heard it. If it was on the radio, you had to hang around waiting for the block to end, hoping that the DJ would actually run through the song and artist name (and that you’d actually catch it). If it was on TV or in a movie, you’d have to wait until the very end and hope you didn’t miss it in the credits. If you heard it in a café somewhere, well… good luck.

Movie and TV soundtracks don’t seem to be as much of a sensation as they were a few decades ago, but the effort put into their creation is just as strong. Skipping out on them as a source for new music discovery seems like a missed opportunity, especially now that we have tiny computers in our pockets ready to identify every song within just a few bars.

#6 Make someone else do the work for you

So far, everything I’ve suggested — save, perhaps, scanning the aggregators — forces you to rely on your own judgment to some degree, or at least requires some modicum of effort.

Effort is, of course, for chumps. And you’re no chump.

If an easy, one-stop-shop for music recommendations is what you’re after, there are a few ways to go about that. But that means it’s time for yet another list. A nested list. A meta-list, if you will.

• Subscribe to a weekly (or monthly) music round-up

  My favorite way to do this is to find record stores that publish their own newsletters. But there are also plenty of TikTok accounts and Substacks that get the job done.

• Listen to the (independent) radio

  College radio is still a thing, and it’s still fantastic. Support your local station, or listen to my local station instead.

• Subscribe to a new music podcast

  I’m contractually obligated to plug my own, but there are a lot to choose from… and many actually update on a regular schedule!

• Follow frequently updated playlists

  Obviously I want to tell you to follow all of my playlists, and there are some I keep on top of more than others. But let’s be honest — my M.O. is pretty much “throw in a track whenever I feel like it,” and that is only marginally helpful.

  What you need is to follow the playlists associated with those record label newsletters I linked up above, or Spotify’s dynamically generated, constantly-refreshing lists of new indie releases (though I personally find this a little bit unwieldy).
  

  Or you can just leave your fate in the hands of public radio.

#7 Talk to your friends

Ask your buddies what they’ve been listening to lately. If their taste sucks, that’s okay — I’m still planning on monthly posts to share new music right here, and I’ve already started turning your recommendations into playlists. We’re also chatting about music, new and old, all the time.

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And that’s it! At least for now.

This isn’t an exhaustive list of new music discovery methods — it’s just a good way to get started, and hopefully make the experience feel a little less daunting.

Let me know what your own discovery tactics are. The more specific, the better. My comments and chat are always open.

1. Except for Jade Tree, which was bought out by Epitaph, all of these labels are still alive and kicking!