Resources for Finding New/Fantastic Music - The Halfchan Guide

[eldri]

Recently, in the hip hop/rap rec thread, I posted several collages of various great albums in that genre. After seeing the response to those images, I want to share my sources for finding music or easing yourself into a genre.

The images I posted are known as essential charts and originate from /mu/. People post essential charts and users agree whether or not they are any good. The good ones are aggregated here in /mu/'s wiki page. In the first link, you can find essential charts for nearly every genre.
For example, I am currently going through this chart.

Spoiler: Synthwave Essential Chart

View attachment upload_2018-11-19_0-23-9.jpeg

In addition to essential charts, there are also flowcharts for specific artists/bands and genres that allow you to sift through discographies or introduce yourself to new genres.
There's also a list of various blogs/review sites to check out.

It is important to note that these charts and essentially the whole wiki page are rarely updated so you may miss out on more recent stuff but there's already alot of information to go through.

 

[DuckSucker]

This is going to come across as "normie" and stupid and shit, but honestly services like Youtube or even Spotify are good ways of finding new music or artists. College radio can suck. but I listen to KUTX which you can listen to on the web at their website, and they have a pretty diverse range of music.

With sites like youtube, what happens is videos are tagged with things, and since it's a service designed to get your specific tastes down to an algorithmic formula, it pretty much selects over videos with overlapping tags to recommend to you, so it's actually a decent way to learn about new shit. Obviously the algorithm gets more robust as you use it more and more because you have more tags associated with your account and shit, but, I mean big brother will always watch you, so google selling my preference in music, or whatever... I couldnt stop them probably even if I had like a MGS style personal army. I think that's the general public's view of shit like that anyway, like, facebook and shit, it's a trade off, but even if you turn down the deal it doesnt matter so you might as well. Hell as a service it is kind of neat, although intrusive.

 

[eldri]

This is going to come across as "normie" and stupid and shit, but honestly services like Youtube or even Spotify are good ways of finding new music or artists. College radio can suck. but I listen to KUTX which you can listen to on the web at their website, and they have a pretty diverse range of music.

With sites like youtube, what happens is videos are tagged with things, and since it's a service designed to get your specific tastes down to an algorithmic formula, it pretty much selects over videos with overlapping tags to recommend to you, so it's actually a decent way to learn about new shit. Obviously the algorithm gets more robust as you use it more and more because you have more tags associated with your account and shit, but, I mean big brother will always watch you, so google selling my preference in music, or whatever... I couldnt stop them probably even if I had like a MGS style personal army. I think that's the general public's view of shit like that anyway, like, facebook and shit, it's a trade off, but even if you turn down the deal it doesnt matter so you might as well. Hell as a service it is kind of neat, although intrusive.

The problem with services like that is that they put you in a box of recommendations so it becomes more difficult to discover something you never though you would like. That's why I limit myself in how much information regarding interests is put out there. I don't want some fuckin' bot restricting me in what I like.

 

[Desire Lines]

I am just gonna quote my own thread I made because I am too lazy to repeat this lol

Last.fm:
This site tracks your listening habits, and recommends you new music based on it. You connect to basically any music player, and it "scrobbles" your tracks to the sites. It used to have a great community, but they updated the site in 2017 with a horrendous new mobile design, which removed a shitton of features and broke almost all plugins made for it. Most people jumped ship, but it is still worth using because they don't really have a competing site.

Pros:

• Easy to use
• Recommends good shit sometimes
• Neat graphs and charts to see your habits

Cons:

• The design is absolute dogshit now
• The old userbase is mostly gone, and the ones left are either unsocial, or normalfags who listen to mainstream pop

Rate Your Music:
This is where I moved after last.fm shat the bed. May be the most extensive music and film database in the world, seriously, if you can think of it, it probably has a RYM page. Users can catalogue albums and movies (you can even choose the format AKA vinyl, digital, CD etc.) and rate them. Has a great chart builder, so if you like exploring genres like I do, or you want to search for more obscure Norwegian black metal, they are perfect. The community is a mixed bag: there are some great users, but there is also this:
↑
When I looked at the RYM score, it was at 0.61. If you don't know RYM culture, a score that low is usually reserved for music with messages that trigger them. The reason for that is because RYM has an insane amount of trannies. They've even formed a clique of sorts on bubblegum bass and noise pages. Seriously, if you go over to RYM and check a page with those genres, you are guaranteed to find at least one genderqueer/transsexual/speshulsnowflake kind of person. I'm starting to think there needs to be a community watch on these people. No wonder why RYM is salty.
So yeah, tread carefully.

Pros:

• Their database is a thing of beauty
• Incredible chart building features
• Some really good and knowledgable members

Cons:

• A bit archaic
• A small percentage of the community are Tumblr rejects and are batshit insane
• DON'T GO TO THEIR FORUMS

 

[AF 802]

I am just gonna quote my own thread I made because I am too lazy to repeat this lol

RYM tells me to turn off that pesky VPN.

 

[Frank D'arbo]

Listen to KEXP, even though it's a Seattle Radio Station, they stream worldwide and play literally every genre, from Loveless by MBV to obscure Indian bands, techno, hip-hop, folk, whatever; and sometimes they dedicate an entire block to breaking down albums and what they mean. I remember they broke down "De La Soul is Dead" by De La Soul years ago.
And they bring on performers a lot, sometimes they debut new songs, ex: Macklemoore debut "Can't Hold Us" back in 2011 when he went on (before he made it huge with Thrift Shop), or you can find exclusive covers, ex: The Flaming Lips did a cover of Kylie Minogue's "Can't Get You Out of My Head."

60% of my iPod is music I found by listening to that station over the last 15 years.

http://www.kexp.org/
https://www.youtube.com/user/kexpradio


If you're in the Seattle area, they're on 90.3 FM


The only other place I know that does shit like this is probably one of the BBC Radio stations.