Music discovery is kind of an issue. The big streaming companies largely hype the overproduced popular nonsense and don't surface much that is interesting (of course some of that pop music, of whatever genre, is interesting, but it is hard to avoid it and so discovery is not much of an issue for that).
Combine this with the woeful, dismal, and increasingly impoverished recommendations of YouTube Music, we've hit a critical juncture, and need to be more aware and exacting of our insights into music discovery.
- I want to reiterate that YouTube music is horrible at recommendations, absolutely atrocious.
Where to get music recommendations
Here are some places I've found music I was previously unaware, or of which I had lost awareness:
- Mastodon / Fediverse (rock, alternative, classical), especially browsing
#musicand also getmusic.fm which has free codes for Bandcamp music (created by the artists). - My children, ages 7 & 9 (from whom I get a lot of J-pop and other anime-related tracks, also meme songs).
- YouTube music (not much discovery, to be honest, except in artist channels, and others such as KEXP).
- Bandcamp (horrible app, and website, but some great music to be found there).
Essentially this is not much more than word of mouth. Perhaps if I pick up scrobbling, that might help.
Scrobbling
Previously I had used Last.fm for scrobbling, but haven't for likely a decade. Just recently Libre.fm shut down. There is also ListenBrainz which can import (regularly) Last.fm scrobbles directly. Thej trusts them, and also uses other scrobbling tools.
However, after a week of this I realized a few detriments, and little in the way of advantage. For one, I became self-conscious about what I was listening to, vs. skipping, as well as what music I favorited. This caused some trouble such as distorting my random track behavior. Eventually I deleted all favorited indicators, then went back to (pseudo-) random tracks, and just started removing the odd ones that I realized I disliked more than liked.
It appears that my matches were really only a subset of other's listening behavior (and vice versa) and so there was little to no actual recommendations to be gained. The music I listen to is multi-genre, though it has its weights heavier on hip-hop, rock, post-punk -- still there is a large part of the collection that is classical, early music, Balinese (visited three times), Hawaiian (lived there for 7 years), and a growing ambient component.