Let’s get this out of the way: There’s no right or wrong way to appreciate music, good taste doesn’t necessarily make you a superior person, and Sabrina Carpenter can hit just as hard as a SoundCloud account with 1,137 followers expelling abrasive experiments. But it’s undeniable that some of the main channels people use to discover music are destroying the culture. Spotify has irrevocably devalued music and locked people in for keeps while its CEO now slings money at defense contractors like a kid throwing money at Pokémon cards. Bands like Xiu Xiu, Deerhoof, and King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard have already pulled their music from the platform, with more surely to come.
For many people, Spotify is the limit to their musical foraging—but there’s so much more you can do. As AI pollutes social media and algorithms silo people into tidy bubbles, listeners will need to deploy canny tricks to escape the force-feed apparatus. Here are some methods for scraping good music from the data wasteland, organized in a hierarchy from bottom-feeder basics to more sophisticated and ultimately, uhh, harebrained strategies.
This is you: Hi, my name is MusicLover46. I LOVE Music! Kai Cenat is my favorite critic. My favorite genres are RapCaviar and New Music Friday. Whenever I get sick of Post Malone and Phonk Mix to Mew To, I ask Spotify’s AI DJ for recs. Or I let the algorithm recommend me something. It’s usually so efficient that I don’t even notice the music changing! So seamless!
If you’re ready to venture beyond the lazy river of the Spotify algorithm and “Made for You” playlists, the car radio and Billboard charts… those ouroboros of context-collapsing, frictionless gluttony, read on.
Try gleaning music from other platforms. TikTok’s musical spawn isn’t as outrageous as it was during the golden pandemic years, when dissonant rap and digicore conquered white girl FYPs, but I still get startled by some of the things that breach the mainstream. Scroll for a bit and you’ll find Bella Poarch testing filters to the tune of Jxxl3s and taconiel’s “MP3PSYCHOSIS,” which throttles like a Bionicle flamenco-footworking all over your face. Maybe you’ll discover 2hollis thanks to some Chobani on My Jeans edits, or perhaps hemlocke springs’ jaunty chirps will seize you from the screen and you’ll have a new artist to base your identity around.
Elsewhere on the front page of the internet, you can watch Anthony Fantano, who’s basically the Oprah of music journalism, and munch on popular Reddit threads like r/hiphopheads.
My go-to basic method for finding new music, without technology and apps, is leaving the confines of my house. I can’t recall how many times I’ve found something sweet after hearing it cannonball out of a car or a street party and asking for the name or quickly Shazaming it. Similarly, the baristas-cum-tastemakers at my local coffee shop have unknowingly put me on to lovely stuff—I don’t know where else I would’ve found Bruce Haack’s Preservation Tapes.
OK, so you’ve widened your horizons, what next? If you’re still not ready to really swing the pickaxe, you can sample from the cottage industry of influencer-critics with curated selections.
There’s “Professional Music Fan” Derrick Gee, who runs the show Solid Air, which involves the former 88rising creative director trading faves with guests like MJ Lenderman and Lorde. Former Pitchfork video producer Margeaux Labat, who interviews and solicits recs from artists like Ichiko Aoba and Nilüfer Yanya and drops a slew of listening logs. Professor Skye, who provides rambling, philosophy-laden meditations on albums that might at first seem out of the wheelhouse of an aging French lecturer, if that benevolent teacher vibe is your thing. Emmuel Reyes, aka Emwell, the interviewer-creator who forces rappers to reflect on their social media inanity on his YouTube show Well Well Well....
No one under the age of 35 uses Facebook, but joining Groups might deliver you some recs depending on the genre. I’m in a hauntology group and one for Tom MacDonald diehards (for research purposes only).
Keeping an eye on Genius’ monthly anticipated albums list can put you on to new projects.
Bandcamp offers a nice way of both supporting artists and ambling through small-scale DIY projects and local scenes. Album releases pages include recs for other similar albums, and you can sort by both genre and amorphous vibey tags.
An easy way to stumble on cool shit with minimal effort: Type in NTS.LIVE. The 24/7 global radio has a remarkable hit rate, with offerings to satisfy basically any taste palate. There’s plenty of just OK episodes better suited for background listening than blissful headbanging, but if you’re lucky you’ll hit a spasmodic set by Vietnamese outsiders Rắn Cạp Đuôi, an Arcadian idyll of a mix from Danish oddball Astrid Sonne, or a rerun of Jane Remover’s furious Wait Watch This.
This is also where you can start molding your social media algorithms. Watch enough 2hollis Chobani clips and TikTok will whoosh you down the Abercrombie & Twitch rabid hole—start with Snow Strippers and nate sib, dip down to Bassvictim and MGNA Crrrta, before finally landing on EQ and real witch house respecters like E_DEATH. Lock in on enough Playboi Carti “RANKING ALL THE SONGS FROM WHOLE LOTTA RED” videos, and the app will open the gates to Edward Skeletrix and Che; then Lucy Bedroque and Xaviersobased; until you finally descend into the holy and heavenly caves of OsamaSon leaks, boolymon shitposts, and whatever the hell this is.
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While Spotify offers a few handy discovery features (my favorite is checking out the weird user-made playlists) they are limited to songs officially uploaded to the platform. It’s way more fun to playlist hop and, even better, like hop in the anarchic swirl of SoundCloud. Sorting through the public Likes of artists lets you see the smaller acts they co-sign and who they were listening to a decade ago. I’ve recently been peering into the Likes of left-field producers like serpuline and Julek ploski, where practically every other song sends me down a wonderful new path till I end up with 80 tabs open. Try bopping from artist to artist, deeper and deeper, until you reach ground zero of a microgenre on the platform. You might just map out the next gen of off-the-wall dubstep designers and nu-gazers. SoundCloud Likes offer a glimpse into the soul—and also the limits of the algorithm vortex. It’s not a black box; it’s just trashwave.
This is also the stage where, if you’re nerdy and online enough, you’ll start perusing RateYourMusic. The site has its issues—Why so few women in the top 50? Why do they all worship Quadeca?—but it’s got a passionate community of music lovers and a mammoth of a rating archive. Dip an ear into their Charts, which you can toggle between different release formats and years, and you’ll find a wealth of killer releases from artists you’ve never heard of.
At this point, you’ve certainly gone past the influencer-critic A-listers, and you’re dangerously hooked on the niche lords who have PhDs in Nettspendology and know every smidgen of lore about World Music and West Mineral Ltd. Your Instagram timeline convulses with the latest info-puke from SADPRT, Tubman Underground and co. You’ve seen Josh Bae’s video essay about the KPOPIUM iceberg, you go back to read old CCRU and K-PUNK blogs, you’ve bookmarked Hardstyle2001’s Tumblr and Pinterest on your browser.
This is when you really take an active (and definitely unhealthy) step forward in your digging, intentionally following YouTube repost pages like karma archives and AtRiskMediaArchive that inundate you in little-known curios. You keep up with the labels and individuals passionately championing certain scenes: the Japanese netlabel Lost Frog Productions for dariacore and hyperflip; user crimedawgbylaw’s MIlwaukee rap lists; the RYM blogger santurce’s ridiculously comprehensive genre genealogies spanning “chetiji” and “diary plugg.” You subscribe to region-specific Substack newsletters and researchers like gg albuquerque. You respect NTS, but you’re also knee-deep in Hong Kong Community Radio and other niche broadcasters.
There’s a swarm of heavily populated Discord channels you can solicit recs in, but there’s also a slew of micro-spaces dedicated to certain scenes full of people posting goodness. You can even discover shards of unfinished songs by joining private channels, like the one for producer collective StudyGroup, which is regularly flooded with tantalizing drafts.
Congratulations: You’re officially an obsessive-compulsive obscurantist.
If you’ve reached level five, turn back. Log off, tryhard. Everything from here will have titles you can’t type with your plebeian English keyboards, with music that defies all sense and logic. At parties, you talk about “SlimeTok” and “GifTok” and your daily news intake centers around the latest developments in this cursed underworld: SpinningTok, DiagnolTok, 3dTok, 67Tok, BlurTok.
Not really, but here are some of my strats for deep digging: reverse-engineering scenes by approaching them via oblique hashtags. Looksmaxxer keywords like “mewing,” “huntereyes,” “mogged” contain (unfortunately) a goldmine of jump- and hardstyle audios on TikTok. This is especially helpful for foreign languages—once you find a certain Cyrllic audio or hashtag, you can leapfrog off of it to unravel entire digital enclaves of Eastern European posters and musicians. This process eventually landed me in Telegram channels for artists like Dj trippie flameboy, Dayerteq, and voidvoice717, who have basically never been mentioned in Western media despite their sizable fanbases. I can’t understand a word but the concert clips are cool.
Other methods that border on stalking include: tunneling into the list of who an artist follows on Instagram; searching up a cool record on RYM that isn’t out yet, seeing who put the project on their “Anticipated Releases” list, and marking down everything else they’re excited about.
I’m also talking about hubs like Music Place, which I covered in my last column, and resources like the Yabujin Masterdoc, which catalogues every release by the mysterious Lithuanian artist. If you’ve made it here, you’re probably familiar with timeline characters like Peter Grimbeek, a SoundCloud obsessive who comments things like “Stutter going steady with bass hum, somewhere in the smog there is a real person (at least one) lost in the purple haze,” on fried rap frags by artists with 21 followers. Or bakuwara, a mysterious Japanese producer who seems to operate a ring of blistering dariacore accounts differentiated by numbers and first names.
Maybe the most underrated digging strategy is what I call “Professional Leaking Under the Guise of Gainful Employment,” or PLUGGË, which involves going to school to become an engineer/marketer/creative director and landing a job at a DSP like Spotify; once you’ve Trojan Goated yourself into the backend, you can listen freely to every artists’ unreleased uploads. We also can’t forget about deep-state file fracking, the process by which you can use Inspect Element to reveal every single media file on a webpage and right-click to download them.
Once you’ve mastered those methods, move on to the holy grail of dig strats, which I call blank dreck: Simply keymash gibberish into the SoundCloud search bar until you find something. There will be an tedious excess of “Sorry we didn’t find any results for ‘asnasncana.’” Eventually, you’ll hit. And chances are, it will be uploaded by mistake, a teenage embarrassment tossed off into the ether and promptly forgotten about by its creator, and the best thing you’ve ever heard.