I quaff the grape’s nectar and doth play diverse melodies from Spotify until I chance upon a tune that pleases me.
I don’t think I ever found music. the music tended to find me.
I spent about 20 years getting stuck in the past while the culture got away from me; I just hadn’t got into any bands since the early 2000s, and it was getting pretty sad.
I also have pretty bad ADHD - music fucks up my ability to concentrate on language-based tasks, so I can’t just play stuff in the background while I do something else - and sitting there staring through multiple songs in a row just isn’t going to happen.
So I had a great idea: turn it into a game.
I nuked my youtube data completely, started again from scratch, and set out, not so much to discover new music, but to train the algorithm to fetch me cool stuff. How well can I nudge the thing into a model of stuff I tend to like?
- Open the home feed, and start going through it
- Reaction videos, influencers, other garbage, hit don’t recommend channel.
- Any music videos, open in new tab
- Rinse and repeat until I have a ridiculous number of tabs open
- Go through each tab:
- Skip through representative chunks of song, get at least 20 seconds of music in before making a decision
- If you just don’t like it, close the tab and move on.
- If you do like it:
- If it’s not posted by the original artist account, go find the original instead if possible.
- Hit like
- Save to playlists for whatever genres it seems to fit, plus a catch-all list (set public, for reasons I’ll explain)
- Open a few new tabs off the sidebar
- If you find three solid bangers from one artist, subscribe.
- When you run out of tabs, refresh the home feed.
It’s adjustable to suit my attention span at the time - if I need the dopamine I just skim more, if I want to chill I let it play longer.
It fits into spare minutes of downtime at work etc.
I have discovered SO MUCH amazing new music, and my tastes have expanded in all kinds of directions. I’ve started not only recognizing but actually having opinions on bands I see on posters as I walk down the street, which is just plain ridiculous for me.
I have gone down some weird and amazing rabbit holes, from Armenian music to Femtanyl.
Probably the best thing I’ve ever done, srsly.
Sometimes the algorithm can get stale, and you end up with a streak of bland, safe stuff that all seems the same.
When this happens, find one of the many third-party playlist-shuffle sites (because the built-in shuffle is still horribly broken), and feed it either your main playlist or some of the genre-specific ones you feel aren’t getting enough love, and listen through a bunch of songs there to dredge up the silt. (you may need to open them in separate tabs; the embed doesn’t always update your watch history properly). And this is why the lists need to be public, so third-party sites can browse your playlists.
I’m mainly interested in old time fiddle tunes. I get them from youtube recommends sometimes, or from going to jams and hearing a cool tune, or someone I play with wants to learn a tune. I often post tunes I like on my old-time music lemmy community.
Community radio, my kids (and they find music through me too), YouTube music recommendations, opening bands at concerts, and sometimes NPR.
Theuppermostinlife curates a bunch of music they like, and I share some of their taste so that’s where I get a bunch of new stuff from.
Bandcamp mostly. They do writeups sometimes like “the best metal from Colorado” or “a deep dive into acid jazz”. They seem to be human written too and not ai slop, at least in the past.
Also seeing who’s playing with who. If I like band A, and band B is opening for them, well I’ll check out band B. I saw “Year of the Cobra” play with “The Well” and it was a good show, and I bought their album.
Mostly through movies/tv shows or sometimes NPR Tiny Desk
Awful.
Currently working my way through 1,001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die with some friends using this website: https://1001albumsgenerator.com
Oh wow, nice share
Anymore it’s either through yt recommendations or sometimes I’ll see other people recommending songs and decide to look them up.
There’s been a decent amount of activity at [email protected] and the music is always all over the place. Popular music, obscure music, non American music, pretty much everything depending on the day.
I browse and occasionally contribute as you know but I really think the community would benefit from some organisation in the form of post title rules over there.
Having a standardised “artist - track title” format or even “artist - track title (genre)” seen as it is such a varied selection over there would really make the browsing experience a lot better than a massive list of just song names in my opinion.
I was going to make a post on the community about this but seen as I see you here I thought I’d just make the suggestion directly to you. I think it would be a positive thing for the community going forward :)
There’s definitely merit in what you’re saying but I’m also fine with it staying how it is.
The idea is that it should be easy to share what you have on, but we’re all using different services. IMO the easiest thing is using Lemmy’s title filling feature which is the song name by default with Spotify links. I believe the other services like YouTube and tidal work similarly.
Many of the posts in that community are made by members while they are working, which also makes me hesitant to enforce title rules on them. Quick and easy posts are easy to blast out when all you have is a second or two. Maybe in time as it becomes more than just a handful of people posting it should be revisited.
FWIW I’m ok with the communities I create never becoming popular on Lemmy. Most are created for a small group of friends to mess around on where other services don’t fit the bill. I’d much rather have fun posting when the mood strikes than worry about fitting a particular posting guideline. If like-minded people happen to join in, awesome. If not, we were having fun before and we’ll continue to have fun without them!
Yeh fair enough, just thought I’d give some feedback from my perspective, I appreciate not everyone uses it in the same way.
Either way I’ll carry on posting occasionally :D
Constructive criticism or meaningful suggestions should be welcomed imo, and when opinions differ reactions like yours are some of the best. I appreciate that you aren’t hellbent on everyone fitting in the same box! Seriously, thank you for the civil interactions!
Footnote- I typed out a long-winded post about fediverse philosophy and decided this isn’t the place for it. Maybe in another thread.
Just contributed myself, and subbed. Always looking for a good jam after a good smoke.
Always nice to have more music in the rotation, thanks for posting!
Nice
Very cool. Kind of like how Pandora used to be when it first started.
This thread is throwing up gold
Find a stoner buddy whose autistic special interest is music and music history. You’ll have endless recommendations for cool shit.
Source: One of my best mates’ autistic special interest is music and music history.
As for me personally, I like looking up music and genres specific to local areas, particularly those from other cultures. Afrobeat’s been big on my mind ever since I discovered it, and I’ve been having good luck searching through old Zamrock albums.
You should post to [email protected] – it’s a world-culture comm
I’ve been paying for a Pandora subscription for about a decade. Worth it. (Piracy is a service problem.)
Their recommendations for similar bands, auto play, and making stations from a band or song has let me discover so much music over the years.
(Piracy is a service problem.)
Piracy isn’t a problem.
I mean, I have a home server setup with 32 terabytes of NAS in a RAID 5 running the *Arrs and Jellyfin pulling from Usenet. Also running Calibre and paying for Anna’s.
Like I told a friend that got huffy with me over how I do my sailing, “I been pirating since you had babyteeth.”
You can be prickly if you want, but increased piracy is a symptom of a service problem. If Netflix hadn’t gone to shit, I’d still be using it. I’m considering paying for Samsung’s art subscription for my TV.
I will pay a reasonable price for convenient media. Make it difficult or expensive enough, and I’ll sail the high seas. Time is money.
I’ve got the same setup but less storage. But more importantly, what’s Anna’s?
