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[uhsting]

Hello everyone, where do you usually discover new (or not so new) music? Every week I spend a tremendous amount of time listening to a lot of songs for my chart which go through a lot of filtering and couple of listens. Here I share some of the sources that I use for finding new songs. In general, there are 4 main sources:

Spotify
YouTube
Magazines/record label websites
Song contests
Personal charts

Spotify occupies a big proportion of the new entries I discover, but also the most time I take to go through all the songs saved. New Music Friday playlists and genre-specific new releases playlists are my go-to choices. However, New Music Friday (NMF) playlists update every Friday and leave no archived data. That means you must get into the habit of saving the playlist every week or else you cannot recover the NMF playlist of the previous weeks. Currently, I save the playlists from the UK, AU & NZ, Canada, US (which weirdly does not label its region and has surprisingly few non-mainstream pop songs from that region), France, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, Finland, Singapore, Poland, Belgium and Iceland. I'm currently trialling Ukraine's and Russia's NMF playlists too. Personally, I used to have Japan, Portugal, Turkey, Mexico, Latin, some Middle-East countries, and some Southeast Asian countries before but they are not to my taste and could clutter up too much that I have no time to go through them all.

As for genre-specific new releases playlist, All New Indie, All New Rock, and Classical New Releases are good playlists for my taste. Friday Cratediggers is a long playlist for dance and EDM songs but they cover a broad range of genres within the dance and EDM general genre, so it could come across as cluttering if only liking a certain part of dance/EDM genre. Recently, New Queer Friday is a playlist not by Spotify that is updated with a lot of great songs by LGBTQIA+ artists (much broader than Out Now playlist), and I highly recommend checking out this playlist too. Finally, you may have heard of Fresh Finds playlists and Fresh Finds: Pop playlist usually has some hidden gems there, while other genres are not quite to my taste sadly.

YouTube occupies a small portion of the new entries. Apart from the popular record labels (Spinnin Records, Ultra Music etc.) and music recommendation channels (MrSuicideSheep etc.), I recommend Cloudkid and Pop Notch for pop music lovers.

Magazines/record label websites have some good songs not included in those NMF playlists. I usually manually save songs recommended by Clash Magazine and Nettwerk Music.

Song contests have a lot of great discoveries too. Buzzjack has a couple of contests which are really good to find hidden gems as well and they sometimes reach a high position in my chart. Elsewhere PopJustice Music Contest (which there are overlapping users), a number of contests in The Song Contest Forums (North Vision Song Contest, NowNewMusic Contest etc.) are also great sources of great discoveries, though it may take time to add all the songs to your playlist individually.

Personal charts have a few good finds as well. Buzzjack has a couple of great personal charts so you should check them one by one! Crownnote is another good site for chart lovers and there are some great charts in the site too that introduce less popular music. YouTube once had a couple of great charts that introduce less popular music too but it has increasingly become less popular because of the copyright issues with music video and audio, hence I stopped uploading there now and focus more on writing up here and archiving my charts through Crownnote.

I hope this post will help you find other great songs in the vicinity and also explain why I know some of the songs in my chart. I'm always open for more sources for new music though I have to be clever with the way since there is finite time in listening to all the songs (and sadly some of them have to be skipped very quickly)!

What about you? How do you usually find new music?

This post has been edited by uhsting: Apr 13 2021, 05:43 PM