How to find new music

No effort

1. Community radio.

The single best answer, and the one most people skip because they assume radio means the thing in a car.

Online community radio is a handful of people in a room playing records they care about for two hours at a time. There is no playlist algorithm, no A&R department and usually no advertising. What you hear is what a specific person thought was worth playing that afternoon.

NTS Radio is the one most often named. It broadcasts from London, Manchester, Los Angeles and Shanghai, runs two channels around the clock, and its archive holds thousands of shows you can start anywhere. Rinse FM came out of pirate radio and still sounds like it, heavy on UK bass, garage and jungle. The Lot Radio broadcasts from a repurposed shipping container on a triangle of land in Brooklyn, and its schedule is closer to a local noticeboard than a station.

Then there are the ones nobody outside their own city talks about, and this is where it gets interesting. Kiosk Radio broadcasts from a wooden shack in a Brussels park. Seoul Community Radio, Bangkok Community Radio, Manila Community Radio, Radio Rudina in the Balkans and Boxout.fm in Delhi all do the same job for their own scenes. They upload constantly, and almost nobody outside their city ever hears any of it.

The catch with radio is that it is live and you are not always free at 3pm on a Tuesday. Which is what the next two methods solve.

No effort

2. Whole DJ sets, not singles.

A DJ set is an hour or more of records that somebody spent years learning how to put next to each other.

That is the argument in one sentence. When you skip through singles you are auditioning tracks in isolation, stripped of the order and context that make them work. When you listen to a set you get somebody else's taste applied over a whole evening, including the records you would never have clicked on.

It is also the most efficient way to discover new artists there is. One good hour can introduce you to twenty artists, and you will remember the ones that stood out because you heard them in a sequence rather than as a thumbnail.

The place to find them is YouTube, where Boiler Room, HÖR, Cercle, Dekmantel, Keep Hush and every radio station above upload full recordings. The problem is the same one you started with: there are tens of thousands of them, the names mean nothing to you, and you cannot tell from a name whether an hour is worth your evening.

One click

3. The Selector.

This is our own tool, and it exists because of the paragraph above.

It holds 62,877 recorded DJ sets from 37 channels, which is the radio and the DJ set method in one place. Press the button and one plays. Press it again and you get a different one. There is no account, no history, and it does not learn your taste, which is the entire point rather than a feature we have not built yet.

You can narrow it first if you want. Pick a channel, pick a genre, or pick a mode: everything, the well-watched end, the quiet end, or the sets that are loved out of all proportion to how many people found them. Then hand the decision over.

The quiet end is where it earns its keep. A large part of the catalogue has almost no views, not because the sets are bad but because a Tuesday show on a Manila station has no route to anyone outside Manila. That is the closest thing to genuine discovery in this list, and it costs one click.

A minute

4. Follow the producer, not the artist.

The most underrated method, and it takes about thirty seconds to learn.

Look at a record you love and find who produced it. Then find everything else they produced. Producers have a sound, they work across artists, and they usually work in a scene, so following one leads you sideways into a whole set of people you had no reason to know about.

This works better than following artists because artists are a brand and producers are a taste. An artist's back catalogue mostly sounds like that artist. A producer's back catalogue is twenty artists filtered through one pair of ears.

If you want to find similar music to a record you already love, the credits are a better route than any recommendation engine. Discogs is the easiest way to read them: look up a release, read the credits, follow the names.

A minute

5. Every Noise at Once.

A map of nearly six thousand genres, each one a clickable dot that plays a representative track.

It was built by Glenn McDonald while he worked at Spotify, and it is the single strangest and most useful music object on the internet. Click "chillwave" and hear chillwave. Click "vintage tango" or "escape room" or "deep filthstep", which are all real genres it tracks, and hear those.

One honest caveat that the videos recommending it tend to skip: McDonald was laid off from Spotify in 2023, and the site's data has largely stopped updating since. It is still an extraordinary way to find a genre you did not know existed. It is no longer a current picture of what is being released.

An afternoon

6. Labels that stick to one sound.

A good record label is a filter that somebody else maintains for free.

The ones worth following are the small ones with a narrow remit, because the narrowness is the point. If a label has put out thirty records you liked, the thirty-first is a better bet than anything an algorithm will hand you, and you can work through a back catalogue in an afternoon.

Find them the same way you find producers: look at the label on a record you love, then look at what else that label released. Bandcamp makes this easy, because labels have pages and those pages list everything.

An afternoon

7. Bandcamp.

Bandcamp is a shop, which is exactly why it works differently from a streaming service.

Because artists are selling rather than accruing fractions of a penny per play, the pages are made by the people who made the music. The tags are chosen by them. The "supported by" list under each release shows real people who bought it, and clicking through to a stranger's collection is one of the best discovery mechanisms anyone has built, mostly by accident.

Bandcamp Daily, its editorial arm, publishes genre guides and label profiles that are written by people who know the scene rather than optimised for a search engine. It is the closest thing to a music magazine that still functions as one.

Ongoing

8. Critics and end-of-year lists.

The oldest method and still a good one, with a caveat.

Music journalism is worth reading when you find a specific writer whose taste you can calibrate against your own. That is different from reading a publication. The goal is to find two or three people who are consistently wrong in a direction you understand, because a critic you reliably disagree with is as useful as one you agree with.

Album of the Year aggregates critic and user scores across publications and is a fast way to see what a year looked like from outside your own listening. End-of-year lists are best read the following spring, when the hype has drained out and only the records people actually kept playing are still being mentioned.

Ongoing

9. Forums and communities.

Most music recommendation online is now algorithmic. Forums are the part that is not.

Genre specific forums, Discord servers and group chats are where people who care too much about one narrow thing tell each other what to listen to. The signal to noise is worse than a curated list and the ceiling is much higher, because nobody is optimising for engagement and somebody has usually already found the thing you are about to find.

The trick is to lurk in one place for a while rather than joining ten. A single active community whose taste you come to understand is worth more than a subscription to all of them.

Ongoing

10. Discogs and RateYourMusic.

Two databases built by obsessives, both useful for the same reason: they connect records to other records.

Discogs is a catalogue of physical releases with full credits, so it answers questions no streaming service can. Who played bass on this. What else did this label put out in 1994. What are the other twelve versions of this record. Its recommendation is not a machine, it is the structure of the credits themselves.

RateYourMusic is a rating and list site with a well-earned reputation for being run by people with very specific opinions. Its genre pages, its charts by year and its user lists are a good way to work backwards through a style you have just discovered you like.

A note on the algorithm.

None of this is an argument that recommendation engines are useless. They are very good at what they do, which is keeping you listening.

The point is narrower. An algorithm optimises for the next play, and the next play that is most likely to succeed is one close to the last. Repeated over months that produces a taste that curves gently inward. Everything in this list is a way of stepping outside that curve on purpose, and most of the methods take a couple of minutes.

If you only take one thing from the list, take the first three. Put a community radio station on while you work. When you find a show you like, listen to the whole thing. And when you cannot face choosing, let something else choose for you.