Try out the Radio Garden app. It lets you pick almost any radio station worldwide and lets you pick through them on a globe. I found a ton of my current favorite artists through it. A few of my coworkers from Venezuela were thrilled to be able to hear stations from their hometowns.
I miss the old Pandora, just a single page website, limited skips (it was free so it was a small tradeoff), and it actually would recommend music that you’ve never heard before that actually sounded similar to stuff you told its algo you liked.
TBF, I haven’t used it in years. These days I stick with YouTube Music ReVanced so I can skip all the music I want for free and without ads. Not a fan of the sound quality, though. I wonder if there is something similar for Spotify…
The only downside is that their algorithm never changed, the same station had the same songs on repeat for 7+ years, not a single new song added per-query for some reason. Keeping it fresh would have gone a much longer way.
I discovered so much music in those days. I’ve never found anything that’s close to equivalent. It’s one of the big reasons I’m still listening to the music I listened to through my teens and twenties.
Every generation: “I know all the generations before me have whined about the new music the kids are listening to, and I always correctly identified their whining as pathetic old-person behavior. But MY generation is actually right. The new music objectively sucks.”
It’ll happen to the current batch of kids, too.
Nobody will ever rise above it. It’s just a basic part of human nature. You might as well ask people to stop breathing.
I think people will still remember a few dozen songs, while most of the rest will simply fall into obscurity.
Also real, longlasting appeal is found in the alternative and more original parts of the music industry more often than in the popular corporate top-10 drivel.
You are simply coping. My take is absolutely the correct one.
Your usage of the phrase “corporate top-10 drivel” instantly marks you out as a music snob. One of the lowest forms of life. It’s just not worth talking to you.
If you go through the music of the era you like, there was slop there are well. Slop isn’t new. You just like some of the music that survived that time period.
Its like with literature. We have “the classics.” The range from a lot of different eras. And many of them are great, even if not for everyone. But then you go through sights like Project Gutenberg, where they are trying to make a digital copy of every book in the public domain, and you start to realize just how many books there were that no one talks about. And those are just ones that have survived.
If you want a great example of this with music: disco. Disco was essentially the pop of it’s time. It’s really where pop was born. Super popular for a short period of time. Lots of famous groups because of it.
How many can you name off the top of your head? How many do you think most people can name? Probably not many. Because a lot of it might have been good, but it was really that good.
I listen to metal. But I didn’t get into it until my junior year of high school. So about 2006-2007. Before that I knew Metallica. I knew Black Sabbath. Things like that, but I never got into the genre until that point. I also realize that I only habe listened to a very small fraction of the bands from that era, because more of it is just buried and forgotten about.
We can take this a step further. I probably wouldn’t be able to list 1/5th of the bands I listened to in the 2010s. A lot of those bands I might think about from time to time, but many of them that I actually enjoyed I’ll probably remember. They were good, but didn’t have much staying power. They weren’t exceptional. They didn’t influence anything. But I still enjoyed listening to them.
This is a shortened version to say that while I’m sure it’s great to cum to your superior taste, music has had slop for a long time, and you’re not better for not enjoying it. You’re just boring.
This is really defensive for no reason. I am fully aware that schlocky mainstream lowest common denominator slop is not new. At all. And I didn’t claim that it was new.
A garbage top 40 song from the 60s can be just as bad, or worse, than a garbage top 40 song today. The point isn’t that bad music is new, the point is that bad music is bad. And that there’s a lot of it. Which is also true of film, books, and really all forms of art. Admitting that is no vice.
That’s kinda missing the point. I am aware my taste in music is not the same as the new generation, still I hear and discover new music that’s actually interesting.
On the other hand, Spotify misses the opportunity to actually offer you discovering new genres, artists, songs that you may like. That’s OPs point, and I agree.
The last time a streaming service actually made me discover new music was 2015 Deezer.
Selection bias is huge too. You could argue that the current hits suck, and that the current hits have always sucked in every era. Lots of them do, they’re disposable trash music.
The difference is that we don’t remember half the garbage that hit the charts when we were young, only the good stuff survives. When I play classic bangers for my daughter, she thinks they’re awesome. Some of those tracks are older than me, but with streaming services and huge libraries “hits” don’t really matter that much when we can now listen to the best tracks picked out of a century of recorded music.
I’m nearly 40 and I like to blast some of the current hits, I like stuff from the 90s and I like classic rock, funk and some of the really old jazz and blues stuff. There’s no reason to act like your age has to determine your musical taste.
I have no time for some of the modern rappers with no skill though, that stuff is objectively trash when we grew up with legends like Outkast, Eminem etc lol
Blah, blah, blah, just a bunch of music snob nonsense, spewing from your keyboard.
Just stop being a music snob. It’s better and easier. You’re NEVER going to convince people to start hating the music that they like. And if you do, that’s just fucking sad for everyone involved.
I can suggest my top 5 most heard artists of 2023:
100 gecs
Lola Indigo
San Holo
Fox Stevenson
Hannah Diamond
I reckon the selection is rather diverse. Depending on which you like, if any, I can recommend more stuff like it (or you can check the section for “fans of this also like those” on the artist page on Spotify, assuming you have Spotify).
First I heard of Stevenson, was probably on the EDM subreddit. Someone posted a video mixing between Go Like (DnB mix) and Like That, under the title “There is no such thing as a perfect transit…” or similar.
Anyways, if you like Stevenson, maybe check… idk, San Holo, Alison Wonderland, Krewella. All electronic musicians normally involved with writing, producing, and performing their songs. Not sure if those are good picks for Fox Stevenson fans, but I like them as well (Holo is in the list above, and Wonderland was my #1 most heard in 2022), and I don’t know whether I’m good at recommending stuff, so… if you do check them out, or already know them, let me know! Nice to have feedback
I’ve found Spotify’s new music algorithm goes - “Oh, you used to listen to Motorhead and AC/DC? I think you’ll like Kiss and Def Leppard”
YT music algorithm goes " Well I think, combining that with all the other stuff you listen to, you’ll like Shaka Ponk, Deluxe, Pretty Reckless etc etc"
Google is a cunt these days but the quality of suggestions is vastly superior
At some point, though, Google starts recommending the same songs over and over and over. That’s the reason for the popularity of curator channels like MrSuicideSheep, xKito, CloudKid, RockMontage, NuclearBlastEurope, Rare and Obscure Metal Archives, and MonsterCat.
I’ve found that Spotify goes “oh you listen exclusively to Scandinavian extreme metal? How about some American screamo OR the exact same stuff you’ve listened to already”, which is the polar opposite to what I want. YouTube music is just a huge mess for me.
Tidal however has reintroduced me to some great bands I had forgotten about and shown me some new ones which are Top Notch ™️
God I miss Tidal. Their suggestions were so far above and beyond everything else I’ve tried, I just wish it was managed and maintained competently. Their Android and desktop apps are (were? It’s been a while) so chock-full of playback bugs and annoying little quirks, and their customer support is probably not even legally considered customer support at all, considering the fact that it seems to consist entirely of a single email bot that receives support tickets, waits 3 weeks, then closes that ticket.
I was particularly irritated with the fact that albums would become “unavailable” so incredibly often, while a new, identical version of the album was made available, for no apparent reason. Since these replacement albums weren’t automatically migrated into my library, I would have to remove and and re-add the albums individually in order to play them from my library, then update all my playlist containing any songs from that “disabled” version of the album by removing and re-adding each individual song. That shit got old, FAST.
I eventually had to swap to Spotify because of an absolutely baffling bug that acted like a virus and slowly “ate” my library (more info below if anyone’s curious), and Spotify’s music suggestions are just nothing short of horrendous.
My “discover weekly” last week for example was made up of approximately 60% songs either already in my library, or songs that I’ve listened to before and not liked much from artists in my library, plus 7 (!!) 20-30+ minute soundscapes, something I have NEVER listened to before, as well as 2 new Ariana Grande singles (sponsored? I’ve had to block her, those singles were popping up everywhere), and a few songs from totally out-there genres, including a country rap song which just so happens to be the one and only song I’ve ever actually disliked back before Spotify removed and re-introduced that feature, some background music from a random indie game’s soundtrack which was mostly just cave noises, a jazz-fusion album’s interlude, and something that I can only describe as bubblegum cyberpunk black glitch-metal dancecore. A positively psychotic selection of music.
Granted, that was the worst discover weekly I think I’ve ever had, but I still just wish that tidal worked for me, because I’ve never discovered more great music from any other platform’s suggestion algorithm, and nothing since has even come close.
About the weird bug if anyone’s curious:
The bug was pretty fucked up in that it behaved basically like a virus. At random points while listening, Tidal would fail to play a song at master quality, automatically downgrade playback by one level, then apply that inability to play master-quality permanently to each subsequent song I played in that session. These songs were now “infected”. Replaying these songs at a later date would further degrade the playback quality by an additional level, and also add a delay of ~20 seconds per playback quality level it had been downgraded to, as well as infecting any other songs I played after. When a song reached 96kbps (or 160? Whatever the lowest is, I forget) and could not degrade any more, it would either play at minimum quality after a ~60 second delay (which was unskippable because Tidal was unresponsive to playing a new song during the delay), or just fail to play entirely while loading infinitely, absolutely chugging my battery-life, and overheating my phone. I could only stop it by force-closing the app, which would crash my phone, every single time. There was about a 20% chance for one of these songs to fail playback, but if it did play, that chance to fail playback was now applied to each subsequent song played, no matter the song’s “infection level”. Though that at least didn’t seem to be permanently applied like the quality degradation, but I don’t know for sure.
The weirdest part is that the bug would persist, spread, and behave exactly the same way on an old phone that had never had tidal installed before, and also with the desktop app (though without the overheating, and it would throw and error message after some time if a song failed to play). So the bug seemed somehow account-bound?
I researched unsuccessfully for weeks looking for a fix, and I tried everything I could to fix it aside from making a new tidal account, because it was a lot of trouble to migrat. And support… Well, Tidal support apparently just doesn’t exist. I had sent 3 separate support tickets, all of which went unanswered, then marked as “resolved” and closed 2-3 weeks later. Only the 2nd ticket got an automated “thanks for your ticket, staff will help soon” response before being marked resolved and closed.
Eventually, so much of my library became infected (as well as a ton of random songs that would commonly end up playing after albums) that my ability to both listen to the music I loved and discover new music in the styles/genres I loved was crippled. Which obviously rendered the entire platform effectively useless. So after being repeatedly ignored by support with no explanation, and after several software updates that didn’t fix the problem while I was trying to contact support, or even just report the bug… I had to give up and switch to Spotify.
Especially with the radio feature. Pick a song that’s totally out of your comfort zone, go to radio and Spotify still manages to squeeze in songs you’ve already listened to 5 times today.
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