How I Find Really Good Music

Every so often, I find a new favorite song. Oftentimes it’s so good that I have to hold myself back from getting sick of it. I’ve spent a lot of time intentionally searching for these songs because I want to find new music I’ll return to for years to come. In the past, this search felt like a grind, and I’d only find truly exceptional songs infrequently. However, after a lot of trial and error, I’ve come to develop a set of practical techniques for it. In this blog post series, I’ll explain my techniques.

I still primarily use Spotify and YouTube to listen to music because they’re so convenient. But they often just recycle songs I’ve already saved or promote popular artists. That’s great when I just want something predictable to put on, but it’s less useful for music exploration. Spotify assigns every artist to a genre, and its suggestions rarely leave the top one hundred artists of whatever genre Spotify has decided you’re currently playing. You can see this directly on Every Noise at Once, a site built from Spotify’s own genre data. Its page for downtempo only lists about one hundred artists:

Hundreds of thousands of artists have made music in this style, but if you start a Spotify radio or check the related artists for any of them, you will rarely find music outside the artists listed above.

Currently, there aren’t any good online alternatives to streaming platforms for music discovery. That’s why so many serious music lovers “crate dig,” sifting through hundreds of random records at a record store and buying the ones that look promising. This process can be time-consuming and expensive, and most albums are likely to be mediocre. Still, this technique offers a unique advantage over streaming services: it lets you explore the full range of published music, not just the limited selection that streaming services typically suggest.

Physically searching through record stores isn’t the only way to get this kind of range, though. My main approach is to go one step higher and search the internet for music collections from dedicated collectors. Finding a collector’s personal library is much better than stumbling upon a single good record, since it can offer hundreds of hand-picked songs from diverse sources. The main problem with this approach is that serious music collectors are rare and scattered across the internet, mixed in with millions of listeners whose playlists consist solely of streaming service recommendations.

How does one actually find these collectors in the vast landscape of the internet? The best way is to start with obscure, high-quality songs you already love. I go through my music library and select a few of my favorite songs that aren’t on streaming services (or have very few views). If I can find these in someone else’s library, it’s a sign they actively seek out music from diverse channels, such as DJ mixes or small record labels. But most websites won’t let you search for user profiles by song. The only way I have found to find these profiles is through indirect methods.

In this series, I’ll break down my strategies for finding and filtering music collections. Some of these strategies are simple enough to try yourself in a few minutes with free online tools. Others are more complicated, and involve high-performance algorithms I designed, data science techniques and sifting through hundreds of gigabytes of public datasets. I even have a technique that uses metadata from P2P music piracy sites (just querying file lists, never downloading any music).