I use the Music-Map for my "music journey". Every other day, I start from an artist I already like and travel through the names until I stumble into an area I have not been to before:
Tracks link to artists on Bandcamp, SoundCloud, Spotify, the write-up that got them picked up by HypeM, and any work from the artist previously covered.
I usually listen by genre and pick those per the kind of work I’m doing. There are many genres. 98% of what I hear is new to me. I favorite and skip tracks and open especially tasty ones in new tabs for deeper-dives.
It’s always a pleasure to go back to my feed of favorites every few weeks. I revisit tracks i took time to explicitly like and have long uninterrupted sets to enjoy. This is usually when I do deeper dives and buy stuff on SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
This is really great. Every now and again I'm fortunate enough to stumble onto a new / unknown artist to me. Weirdly, Grooveshark was really good for this (as it gave me some of my very top favorites through a Grooveshark Premium thing -- Quiet Company and Justin Townes Earle) but I've found generally limited utility in going from those new bands into either Google or Spotify's "More Like This" functions.
Looking at the map for Quiet Company yields a list of names that are mostly foreign to me that I'll be plowing through as I work.
That's very cool, I've been thinking about making a similar thing to discover new music but for a few bands I checked this does both provide bands I know to be similar as well as bands that I don't know.
Indeed! But that wasn't what I tried. Just tried that one though and a few limitations pop up. Omar's solo projects turn up a large distance away from the band, lesser known bands that I consider to be very close in sound don't show up close to it. And there are multiple entries for Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, with and without the dash.
I'm starting to feel that depending on users to provide explicit lists misses a lot of interesting data, unfortunately.
Putting in a few unpopular artists that I like came up with a lot of related bands that I already know and like, plus double that number that I now need to add to my ever-growing music to-do list.
HypeMachine tracks the music being written about across thousands of blogs and still works for me as a great discovery / serendipity engine.
https://hypem.com/
Tracks link to artists on Bandcamp, SoundCloud, Spotify, the write-up that got them picked up by HypeM, and any work from the artist previously covered.
I usually listen by genre and pick those per the kind of work I’m doing. There are many genres. 98% of what I hear is new to me. I favorite and skip tracks and open especially tasty ones in new tabs for deeper-dives.
It’s always a pleasure to go back to my feed of favorites every few weeks. I revisit tracks i took time to explicitly like and have long uninterrupted sets to enjoy. This is usually when I do deeper dives and buy stuff on SoundCloud and Bandcamp.