New Music Discovery 101

Finding new music used to be as easy as turning on MTV2. Now it can seem daunting... at least to find the good stuff. Where do you start when you haven't been keeping up for years?

DISCLAIMER: This post was written before I fully understood just how absolutely disastrous Spotify is for artists, let alone all of the villainous evil it’s been up to. I do still use it for a number of curatorial reasons, but I encourage anyone to quit who isn’t as entrenched in their ecosystem. I aim to rewrite this post with a no-streaming approach soon.

One of the complaints I hear most often when I recommend new music is “I don’t know where to find any of this stuff on my own.”

When we were kids, it seemed like everything was curated and manageable — we had MTV, magazines, local radio stations that had some variety before they were all assimilated by Clear Channel, and mixtapes passed around between friends. The world of good music was always vast, but we had lodestars to guide our way.

Now, streaming has made that vast world seemingly infinite. Radio stations are either playing the same songs that we were listening to thirty years ago or homogenous, indistinguishable pop. Print i…