Discovering Music Again

If you were in my close circle in the past 6 months or so, chances are that I mentioned to you that I quit Spotify for good. I can ponder on a few reasons why, but in summary, this whole system started to bother me — especially after the CEO decided that weapons were a good investment of his profits. Also, it is no secret how little artists get back from their own work in those platforms.

But my point of this post is not to prove you how much this whole streaming scheme is flawed, but rather to share how I have been discovering new music. I've found artists that have been truly inspiring to me and my music. This is not an exhaustive list, but it is enough to take you down a rabbit hole, if you allow yourself.

Diggin' the crates

My personal collection of CDs so far

One very rewarding way of discovering new music has been collecting physical media; in particular, CDs. I grew up listening to CDs, and making my own "playlists" for a long time. Also, Pirated media was huge growing up in Brazil, so I would often go to the street vendors to get some things that I heard on the radio. So I had a massive collection of albums to listen to from various genres.

What has been great nowadays is that CDs are very cheap now, and you can find some very good stuff in some random thrift shops in the middle of nowhere. Also, if your local library has a CD section, please check it out. I recently found an entire collection of Pat Metheny albums that my local library was getting rid of during their Spring Book Sale. I brought 7 or 8 of them home, and paid $4 for it.

Ripping CDs has also become a habit. I keep digital copies to avoid the damage that all physical media are subject to, while also allowing me to transfer the media to my phone so I can listen to it everywhere.

One fun aspect of this for me, is not only the music discovery, but sampling. I enjoy making music with samples, and CDs are a cheap way in. There are countless crates in record stores with albums for $1 or $2. Albums that probably never made the big charts, but that contain great music, that can be used as the source for my own art. I recall having countless albums recorded by teachers of mine, that never hit the big charts, but that were formative to me in my music education, and a similar logic is applied here.

Internet Radio and Icecast

A lot of the electronic music I enjoy comes from the UK. I gravitate towards bass-focused music, and the sound system culture was the building block of the UK music scene.

One awesome thing about the history of the UK scene is the importance of pirate radio stations and the DJs who ran them. DJs curated music long before an algorithm did, and many are still hosting radio programs where they mix a set live. I use a lot of those programs to discover new things for my music collection.

I use VLC Media Player on my desktop and phone. And an underexplored functionality of that app is the ability to stream audio from different protocols. In VLC, the menu under Media -> Open Network Stream, allows you to listen to network streams from any radio link. The website fmstream allows you to find radios from all over the world. And with the provided stream link, one can also stream straight from VLC.

I organized some of my favorite radio stations in a playlist in VLC (saved as a '.xpsf' file) which I can open later for quick access. This, combined with the various DJ-hosted radio shows, allowed me to discover many artists of the scene that I would have not found otherwise — all curated by individuals that have been on the scene for a while.

Another amazing thing I found on VLC was Icecast — a streaming media (audio/video) server that many use to create online radio stations. VLC comes with a Icecast Radio Directory with links of radios from all over the world. Oh, boy! How much fun I had! There are all sorts of things there, and with a bit of patience, one can find some real gems.

Bandcamp, of course!

I really, really enjoy Bandcamp, and have purchased a good amount of music through the platform. They have great filters in their search engines, that I have used extensively to explore the platform. They also provide a Bandcamp Daily blog one can explore with some very cool articles in there. For example, I recently went through this article about the women of Detroit House scene that presented me a few artists I never heard of.

One cool strategy I learned about recently was to explore the libraries of other users who bought the same albums you did. The logic is pretty simple: if you shared interest in one title, chances are that you share interests in different albums as well that you might not know of. It is pretty simple, but pretty rewarding as well.

Honorable Mentions