Where/How Do You Find New Music in 2026?

[BONES]

This came out of another discussion but I thought it was possibly worthy of its own thread. It was easy 40 years ago, you went into a record shop and you looked through the shelves, often categorised by genre. You found something that looked interesting, asked to have a listen to it in the shop and then you bought it or not. If you lived in a big city you even had access to record shops that specialised in whatever it was you were into. e.g. in 1995-96 I co-owned a record shop that specialised in Industrial and Goth music. At the time there were 7 or 8 other specialty shops, each with their own areas but still with plenty of overlap. When our shop closed, I went to work a couple of days a week at one of the others, curating their Goth/Industrial section for a few years.

By the mid-2000s, though, most of that was in tatters, having been battered by Napster and mp3.com and the general availability of pirated music on line. Search engines weren't that great so unless you knew exactly what you were looking for, it got much harder to find new music.

It wasn't until the mid-teens that I got onto a few new ways to find new music. I'm sure there are others. I'll share mine and it would be great for others to contribute any that they might use to find new music.

I bought a Zune HD in 2010. The Zune ecosystem was amazing, the closest experience to the old school record collection that I have ever found. Zune's "Related Artists" selections were an excellent way to find new music. Some of it was new new but there were also a lot of artists from the 80 and 90s that I had been previously unaware of, so I got a lot of music that was new to me as well. It was a golden era for me, where I was buying several albums a week for quite a few years, until Microsoft dismantled the Zune ecosystem, just as streaming music was taking off. Zune still works but you can't buy music through it any more and the Related Artists stuff never gets updated, so it's a finite resource today that I have well and truly tapped out.

So today I mostly find new music through Bandcamp and Discogs. Neither related artist services do as good a job as Zune did. The hit rate is much lower but if you're patient and persistent, you can find some great stuff. With Discogs, in particular, there is a lot more information available, which gives you a lot more threads to pull. You get to see what other acts members of bands you like were in and exploring that often leads to finding good stuff you didn't know about or hadn't bothered with. e.g. I discovered Sad Lovers & Giants (SLaG) through Zune but via Discogs I discovered that two of those guys had gone on to do Snake Corps, which I like even more than SLaG. Ditto for looking into labels and even seeing what other things producers of albums you liked worked on. Discogs also puts me onto obscure releases from a lot of artists I like, so just looking up your favourite artists on Discogs can reveal some gems.

Anyway, these days I probably still buy an average of 3 or 4 albums a month, which is pretty good, I reckon. What other useful ways have you found to find new music?

[eassae]

Various reddits are good. You can usually find subreddits for most genera.

[foosnark]

I miss the Zune hardware -- the last good dedicated MP3 player I had was a limited edition red Zune, I think it was third generation, and it had a much higher capacity hard drive than most other players of the time. But the PC software was crap. I don't really recall using Zune to find/buy music. At the time I was mostly ripping my own CD collection and downloading stuff from mp3.com and... I don't remember the name, but there was some subscription website where you could download some number of albums per month from independent musicians.

Now I mostly get stuff from Bandcamp. Sometimes from browsing it, often from reviews or recommendations on websites, and from other musicians on ModWiggler or Lines. But my library's getting overstuffed and I've started archiving the less-enjoyed half of it, just to be able to fit the rest on my phone and not have to wade through as many titles. So I'm getting more particular about what I buy.

[BONES]

I still have my Zune HD. They removed support for it from Windows 10 a while ago but restored it after Starlord was using a Zune in the last Guardians of the Galaxy film. So now that I can update the music on it, I've been using it regularly and keeping it topped up with my latest purchases. Of course, at 64GB it is only capable of holding about a quarter of my collection so I always have to delete something to make room for something new. But the Zune HD remains my all-time favourite gadget. There is something about the design, the way it feels in your hand, the interface and the functionality that resonates deeply with me. I've got a box of spare parts which should keep it working for a long time.

I never listen to music on my phone, since they stopped putting headphone jacks in the f**king things. I keep my collection on my computer, backed up onto one of my other mp3 players with a 512GB microSD card, with a second back-up on an external drive (which only gets updated rarely). At home I listen through my studio monitors from the PC. In the car I've been using USB thumb drives since 2009. It's simple and convenient. When I'm out and about it's one or another of the 3 mp3 players I keep up to date, usually the Zune now. I also have three portable speakers I use with the mp3 players in social situations, mostly to annoy people. The Zune doesn't have Bluetooth but I prefer a wired connection anyway - the quality is noticeably better and it stops other dickheads from hijacking the speaker. (Only this dickhead gets to play with it.)

I never understood why the Zune software had such a bad reputation. For me it is far and away the best application I've found for keeping my collection neat and tidy. Editing metadata is a breeze and you can do it in bulk, asymmetrically. Just last night I was tidying up recent releases, eliminating inappropriate genre tags, fixing spelling errors and making sure everything had the right artwork. I love the screensavers it generates, too -

Screenshot 2026-02-19 153533.png

[Bunny_boy]

BBC radio stations
Radio1: Chart and pop music
Radio1 xtra: grime, dubstep, hip-hop, drum n bass, garage, bassline, etc (um, might be showing my age with some of those genres...)
Radio2: old stuff
Radio 3: classical during the day; experimental / avant-garde at night
Radio 6: indie, rock, etc
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/help/quest ... ide-the-uk

For those outside the UK - as the BBC is publicly funded it doesn't need to appeal to lowest common denominator stuff.

https://www.thewire.co.uk/home/
Hip-hop, jazz, noise, rock, electronic, dub, etc

https://www.resonancefm.com/
Loads of different styles

https://thequietus.com/
Covers loads of different genres

https://www.factmag.com/
Mainly electronic, but does cover artists that fall just outside that orbit as well.

The Guardian's music section covers quite a lot as well
https://www.theguardian.com/music

Record labels / distros
https://warp.net/
https://bleep.com/
https://hyperdub.net/
https://gondwanarecords.com/
https://igetrvng.com/
https://deathwishinc.com/

And of course
viewtopic.php?t=281858

[vurt]

youtubes algorithm has been doing fairly well recently.
had at least. 4 acts since xmas from that

then the usual, people i chat with, about music we have in common, then we'll mention other stuff. less hits there tbh, as we're all a similar age so all tend to have followed the same paths already....

young people's clothes. seriously, read their tshirts/patches to look for new stuff.
difficult in some genres where the logos look like roots all tangled up.

[Zeisner]

For me it's also YouTube. Its algorithm has interesting hickups if not logged in. I also like the compilations some people make out of SoundCloud findings.

[BONES]

For those outside the UK - as the BBC is publicly funded it doesn't need to appeal to lowest common denominator stuff.

The ABC here used to be the same and 2JJJ was where I was exposed to a lot of great music - Alien Sex Fiend, Scraping Foetus Off the Wheel, Bauhaus, Clan of Xymox, The Sisters of Mercy and Nine Inch Nails, to name but a few. But in the late 80s they decided to take JJJ national and thought they needed to broaden its appeal. Since then they basically play Top 40 music a few weeks before it gets into the Top 40. I find it almost unlistenable these days, worse than the commercial radio stations.

The ABC won't play our music, they won't play our video clips, they give us zero support and they won't even do us the courtesy of explaining why they ignore local artists. I'm sure it would be very different if we identified as Indigenous or non-binary of if one or the other of us was neuro-divergent but being middle-aged white guys means we get nothing.

[vurt]

can i get that gif of grandpa simpson at the burlesque house?

[bermudagold]

Another kvr thread with the same idea
viewtopic.php?p=9006834&hilit=curation#p9006834


I've had some success with this...quantifying buzz through blogging traffic from webcrawling...music went from an access to distribution problem for creators, ...to an access to trusted/valuable curation problem for consumers

https://hypem.com/popular

for instance one day the first entry was Brenda Fassie - Vul'indlela...I had known about this song for decades, but I bet the vast majority of their users have never heard that record in their lives

and
https://app.radiooooo.com/
lets you pick a place on the map and see a curated view of what they think is standout right now

[CrystalWizard]

All commented already...Word of mouth, music festivals, Modwiggler, VI Control, Lines, the Music Cafe here, Bandcamp, i've gotten a good bit of new ( or new to me) hits there, even Soundcloud still, opening bands, film/soundtrack, YouTube (plenty of channels full of interesting stuff), events, internet radio stations SomaFM, classical, jazz, and just about any kind of stuff , WFMU.
I can't keep up with the amount of new, recent, less recent, old, and centuries old music coming my way.
I made a comment in another topic that it used to be easy to discover new material by reading the liner notes on LPs* and CDs, which is harder to do now but BC is still a good resource for that.

I wasn't sure whether to post this here or the other topic mentioned, perhaps they could be merged?

* after we finished cleaning weed on them.

[BONES]

It must be so much easier when the kind of music you like actually gets played at festivals. We have to travel half-way around the world for that.

https://hypem.com/popular

It seems a bit random. They have the new release from Actors (which I already have) but nothing around it is even remotely similar., although I did find something else I kinda liked (Charm School).

https://app.radiooooo.com/

As soon as I clicked they wanted me to sign up. Without an account it looks like it does nothing. But it does remind me of a classic that's been around for at least 25 years -

https://music.ishkur.com/

There's one of our songs (the first thing we ever released) in the EBM line.

[Michael L]

The key is finding related artists.

I use the different Bandcamp search engines: daily featured, keyword tags, search artist name, monthly best of, yearly best of, I follow one of their curators, check out the lists of buyers of the same, but I get the most good hits from other artists on the same labels, and anthologies of new artists.

The other way is to find interviews with musicians in your genre. That gives quality over quantity

[Bombadil]

I simply don‘t bother.
I, too, remember the days of anticipation as I walked into my favourite record shops.
Those days are long gone.
I‘ve been a member of a few online recording communities, some with radio stations to showcase members‘ music.
I found a lot there worth listening to. More than I‘d find on contemporary radio.
There‘s so much music written and recorded from the Renaissance up to around the early 1980‘s that towers above what‘s on offer these days, I see no reason to bother.

[bermudagold]

https://hypem.com/popular

It seems a bit random.

I think that's the point...webcrawling blog activity on music is one way to quantify the zeitgeist...but what would generate that activity I would imagine is rather unpredictable...I rarely hear the same genre more than twice on first page of the popular feed every time I log in

https://app.radiooooo.com/

As soon as I clicked they wanted me to sign up. Without an account it looks like it does nothing. But it does remind me of a classic that's been around for at least 25 years -

If you don't want to create an account I don't think you can create a taxi or navigate by country/city or decade...but without signing up you can still hit "shuffle mode-The curators choice" or choose an "island" which are themes...and if you don't like the song you can hit next to get another one...however prolly worth a sign up to give a whirl