Hiya Elektronauts,
Alright so this might be a bit of a random thread with 2 questions,
- How and where do you discover music these days? do you get your new tunes from the radio, playlists online, blogs or something else?
- Are there any go-to radio shows for you where people not only play but also talk about electronic music they like?
To make it fun, imagine you’re on a desert island and you get 1-3 shows/playlists/places that you can go to get your fill of music, whether than be new/old or a blend of both. Where are you headed to get it?
Bonus
I’d welcome any recommendations based on your own personal tastes, but if you have any pointers that might line up with my own (slightly odd) tastes I’d be super interested to hear if anyone has specific tips on radio shows that might cover artists like these…
Random taste backstory:
Anything I picked up from the more electronic side of things when I was younger was either accidentally or by sheer exposure (talking about big beasts like Chemical Brothers, Underworld, Massive Attack, Prodigy, AFX etc…) Love a 90s classic.
As a bit of a field guide (caveat: I have absolutely no idea about what most of these genres mean, or even if they’re right, so apologies in advance.) These days I like stuff like Burial, Vacant (Future garage stuff) Tourist, Jamie XX, (downtempo/UK house-ish stuff with a tinge of garage here and there?) - more mainstream/melodic stuff like Lane 8, Jeremy Olander (“progressive?!” apparently…) and Jon Hopkins, Ghosting Season, The Field (these are a bit of a mixed bag to be fair, they can be quite evocative but can also be very minimal sounding in their own unique ways).
I also enjoy the odd mixtape or Essential Mix on Radio 1. ; for example Friendly Fires have done some fun deep house mixes over the years, and these are a lot of fun for learning about the backstory of genres like deep house etc. I also like the recent TSHA acid house mixtape, especially because both these artists usually blend the old and new together quite nicely.
L
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following out of interest. Honestly I just really don’t listen to a ton of new music unless I’m intentionally crate digging and that more often than not is like sitting listening to someone spin a radio tuner stopping in random places.
getting a bit sick of YouTube for this sort of stuff too, gives me the ominous feeling that I’m living in a big advert. I’d love some more obscure sources. My secret source is honestly blogspot 
. There’s loads of random music connoisseurs with blogs where they post all sorts of random stuff. Some have been going for years don’t want to post my favourites names because they’ve been you know…posting thousands of direct download links for years on end. But if you have a dig around you can easily find some great stuff on blogspot. some sit and write full music critic reviews as what seems to be an anonymous hobby. Not sure how deep this goes for specifically electronic music but im sure they’re out there
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brisket
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There was an era of great blogs about ten years ago, esp for more obscure stuff. The ones I loved are gone tho…
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tdmusic
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Are Spotify and Soundcloud valid answers or is that too general, lol?
I find Spotify’s discovery features pretty great, especially the music that it auto plays after you’ve listened to an album or whatever. It sometimes goes off piste or into a bit of a loop after a while, but I usually discover at least one thing to check out from it. The recommendations under playlists are good too, I have playlists for different genres and it’ll often surface interesting stuff. Artist/song radio can be good. I don’t use Discover Weekly any more, I used to love it but mine got polluted with crap somehow and never really recovered.
I listen to a lot of DJ sets on Soundcloud. If I come across an artist I like, I will check out their Soundcloud. The majority of producers in the genres I like (techno, hypnotic stuff, ambient) also DJ, so I’ll listen to their sets and it’ll often lead me to more interesting stuff if there’s a track I like. Kind of a fractal of discovery heh. There are some good radio shows on there too from smaller online radio stations (plus some bigger ones like NTS and Rinse) so sometimes I’ll just put something on at random. I actually think Soundcloud is a pretty crap site, it could be much better at recommendations and discovery, but it does the job and there is so much on there.
I am just getting back into DJing so I’ll probably be using Bandcamp a lot more again, on there I’ll trawl an artist or label’s back catalogue, and sometimes look what other people who reviewed a certain release have in their collection. Again, could be a much better site for discovery but it has tonnes of great stuff.
YouTube can be good for listening to stuff that isn’t on the other platforms but their recommendation algorithm is no good for me.
Also lucky enough to have friends with similar musical interests and we share tracks in a chat we have set up.
tdmusic
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Yes! I used to love mp3 blogs. It’s a real shame they died out, I found some great stuff. There was a cool site called gabba.cc which introduced me to a lot of stuff too.
Yeah the same goes for my usual guitar based stuff to be fair. Most have been and gone - and fair enough since it’s usually one or two people doing it for the love of it.
100%. If that’s how you find stuff then yeah it’s totally valid. Personally, I have found some music via their discover feature but I have a reasonable depth of knowledge in the genres I’ve actively followed, so most of the time what it shares with me isn’t new. That said, I might just fill a playlist with my fav electronic stuff and see what it shares.
The DJ set thing is a great shout actually. A little like the Essential Mixes, getting pointers from an artist is fun. I listened to Elkka do a Radio 1 residency, and that was really varied & interesting DJ type set so maybe a little more time there wouldn’t be a bad thing.
checking out other artists within a record label in which you already like something is worth a try.
also mixtapes/compilations on youtube, if they have a track or two that you like, you might like the others too.
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Noted. This has been something I’ve done with more guitar based music and it really has been a constant. As mentioned above, you need to freshen up the feed once every year or so (for all the sites that inevitably close) but I will say there are 2-3 sites that are probably 80% of my new tunes in that style. I’m happy enough with YT links as anything I like the sound of generally goes into a Spotify playlist.
Since we’re sharing though; my secret sauce/source for rock stuff is to get a list of maybe 10 albums I’m digging; and google “Album X Review”) and head to maybe the 4th or 5th page of Google for site with a decent ratio of signal/noise. Usually I’ll find some reviews off random sites which can be fun. If I like their stuff (eg: well written, easy to find youtube links etc) I’ll give them a follow in my reader and then rifle through them when I get a night to myself.
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tdmusic
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Yeah, for dance music I find it’s a great way to discover stuff. It’s a shame more DJs don’t post tracklistings for their sets as a lot of great music goes unidentified – part of me feels like they should make more effort to promote the people who’s tunes they are playing, but then there is also fun to hunting down an unknown track!
I’ll often end up discovering lots of new stuff through people’s DJ sets – I’ll google the artist of a certain track, end up on their page, listen to some of their stuff, then google the person who remixed a certain track, etc, etc. One other thing I forgot to mention is that DJ sets are quite often affiliated with a certain podcast or mix series or radio station, a lot of the smaller ones can have a quite focussed sound, so this can be a great way to discover new artists – go to the series’ Soundcloud page and skip through the sets to see what takes your fancy.
One other thing I use a little bit is Instagram, I don’t use it as a social network really but I do follow artists I like on there, which can be a good way to find out about new releases from them etc. I’ve got iOS set to limit it to five mins usage a day though, it’s an addictive way to waste time lol.
tdmusic
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What do you use as a reader? I used to enjoy Google Reader then when that shut down, I kind of stopped using feeds at all. Real shame. I feel like a lot of stuff has moved to social networks unfortunately, but I’d be up for giving a reader another go.
order a few rolls of alien tape… will help clean all your gear and it’s rewashable and reusable so it’ll last forever lol,
omg should have read the op …
I like old music blogs that don’t even still have any active links to anything , they are great places to learn and if something catches your interest you can look up the music elsewhere.
love the old mutant sound blog
LAMPED
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Hard one as over the years it has changed so much.
Early days was getting my bros unwanted punk cds that he bought hoping they’d be heavy metal (going by artwork…)…
Then it was from record sleeves when bands used to thank other bands…
Then when I was into lanning pcs, youd nick all your mates mp3s….
Then just anything and everything on bit torrent sites…
Then it was support bands when I starting going to gigs all the time…
Then I got into electronic music from a flat mate who kept blasting German dance mixes…
Then it was all about blogs when they would stick up mixes and albums in winrar files every day with a review…
Then it was sound cloud dj mixes back when soundcloud was cool before they watered the app all down…
Now sadly, it’s just whatever Apple Music playlists chuck my way…
I miss the days when I had time and could go down the rabbit holes for hours on end to try out endless music…
Currently Inoreader. With the paid version you can follow pages that don’t have RSS feeds and social networks. TBH I only got it for work stuff, but ended up following music stuff with it too. The goal I think is to cut down on visits to rabbit holes, and it works well. For example, I only really use Twitter to follow websites/reviewers that don’t have a traditional webiste, and I can read their links/stuff in the same place as my websites. You can also do stuff like have it show you only the reviews on a certain site, by disallowing other content you’re not interested in.
RSS is (as you say) a lot more thin on the ground since Google Reader shut down, so sometimes a service like this can be useful. And I should say that paid version is not necessary, the free tier is absolutely fine and I may be returning to that soon myself. I also hear good things about other services like Feedbin who offer a similar thing.
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In the old days it was radio, genre specific late evening shows were good for hearing new stuff.
Swapping CDs to listen to in class was another good one, or the old one earbud each - I had a mate who used to bring this massive folio of cds to school and had plenty of exposure to music from older siblings that I hadn’t heard.
I also remember trawling through the local metal record shop’s online catalogue and then spending a laborious few hours downloading an mp3 of any bands whose name appealed to me.
But yeah, these days basically spotify from the playlist that follows an album I’ve put on. Also tv shows and occasionally podcasts.
Cheers! Will give these a spin.
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