In January of 2025, I sat down and went through the Wikipedia listing of album release dates for 2025. But, yeah, I basically wrote down bands I already knew. The couple of websites I had bookmarked for new releases were just too much for me to make heads or tails of. I quickly abandoned my idea of spending time listening to new music that way. I mostly listened on recommendations and stuff I liked on my local alternative station.
This year, I have made an actual effort! I start with the no ripcord release calendar because at least it has genre. I am going to say that Spotify has been the biggest source though (may not be a popular one). As I was listening to an enormous amount of stuff in December, I clicked “follow” on every artist I liked. If they had a new album coming out, I clicked “presave.” I’ve also used the no ripcord list to presave albums in Spotify. Every Friday, I also listen to a couple of Spotify playlists highlighting new singles, when I hear stuff I like, I go check to see if there’s a new album coming and presave it.
Every Friday, I go listen to any albums I’ve presaved first, then I go check no ripcord to see if there was anything else that caught my eye (but, yes, with the lack of info, I’m going on genre alone here).
One of the local record stores (it’s actually two stores that are related, most of the time both owners are there) does a segment on the local alternative station on Friday mornings talking about new releases. They only talk about titles they’ve ordered. I know from talking to them that one owner mostly decides what to order by the record label (if there isn’t name recognition). Their list to order from is just titles and record labels. The other owner will go listen to singles and have listening parties with his employees to decide what to order (his store is bigger and he has more ability to take chances on stuff).
Whatever they talk about that sounds good, I add to my list if it isn’t already on it. There’s always a few things that aren’t on other lists.
I also check the Discord to see what other people are talking about.
I have checked the MOPS site a few times, but I mostly do all my listening on Fridays and over the weekend. I need to remember to go there on Mondays! Especially since indie/alternative is my main preferred genre.
I would love to have a release calendar that gives more info! Especially the RIYL piece.
Great to hear you find it useful, Kristin. I’ve started highlighting more releases in there to provide a little context. Can you think of anything else that would make it more useful?
They are absolutely overwhelming, so I release a list of what I liked from the last week every Thursday, but that is essentially too late because everyone is looking forward to Friday already.
I do use release calendars though, and like you wish there were some quick descriptors. MOPS is great, and I’m glad they’re back from the short hiatus. Shatter the standard is completely overwhelming, but does use genre descriptors so it’s a little easier to visually filter out what you might be looking for. On X there are a few guys I follow that seem to have pre-filtered their drop list every Friday, Ruben//Check the Rhyme, and Jah Talks Music are my go to hip hop guys. Brad Luttrell, and Modern Country Music That Doesn’t Suck, are my Americana/Country guys. AlbumsColector on insta is my metal plug, and YOU are my indie/post-punk guru!
I kinda ignore them! I find them overwhelming because as you've noted it's just a list of stuff and I have no idea what some of it is, and the list isn't terribly helpful. I do find MOPS and ..well, you (and your Discord) helpful, and then of course there's stuff I'm excited about coming out that I track of myself. But good stuff comes to me by way of recommendations, which is why resources like the ones you've mentioned are so helpful.
I think MOPS actually is where it's at but that has to be a tremendous amount of work and I sincerely don't know how Mariana does it (I know she had to take a break for a bit).
haha it IS a lot!! I literally spend the whole week hunting down links and putting it all together, but I love to share music! The break was just some family stuff going on but I'm back now :) So glad you like it! <3
I don’t use anything like this at all but that’s really because I have reconciled myself to being way behind on most new releases. (I have taken your less is more instruction to heart and am enjoying sitting with fewer albums a bit more!) Where I am ahead of the game, it will be with small bands that I’ve seen play support gigs and subsequently kept track of. As someone who spends a lot of time in live music venues, this works well for me but is obviously fairly limited. I find it quite hard to go and check things out when all I have is a name (even a FFO doesn’t really drive me to listen.) There tends to be a cumulative effect that I will hear a name mentioned by a few people and at some point it will compel me to investigate. If someone tells me specifically that they think I’ll like something, I always appreciate that and will definitely check it out. I agree that release calendars are like festival line ups. You are scanning for the familiar names rather than using them for discovery. I don’t know if that’s always a bad thing though. Personally, I think I’d be more annoyed at missing a release from an artist I know I like than from a new one.
ur mockup is actually great, i obsessively used to go through stereogums release calendar and just look for band names i thought sounded good, but i def ended up missing a lot of good shit because of it.
Oh wow, I can't believe I got a mention, thanks so much Gabbie!
New Music Tracker is just starting out and a lot of what you want I have been thinking about as well. RIYL is tricky as I want it to be curator driven rather than algorithmic. The general direction I want for the site is more of a curation platform, eventually one where curators can get paid for the work they're doing already
My weeks are super uneven. Some weeks I have much more time than others to dig.
I would love a release calendar that listed everything and was heavily filterable. I want to filter genre, label, RIYL, release length (single, EP, LP), links to streamers, associations, etc. Basically all the fields you included in your card @gabbie.
This is a super tall order if this info is coming from the calendar operator given the volume of releases, but I think if there is a framework established that makes entering this information part of the process for the label to release the album, it would be possible to pull all the metadata along programmatically without a ton of friction or effort.
Give those who are building more data to include or not include, rather than them having to tack it on post facto.
The best path, I think, to getting something like this in place would be to have the framework created, then present to the labels for adoption. Also, folks like DistroKid would need to be involved.
It is a win for all involved. In theory, such a framework gets the label more of an opportunity to send information along with their releases, which means more people are likely to bite, especially on new bands. All of us worm hunters get better insights and better tools to find new music. Folks who are on the sidelines also have tools available to them to find stuff they might love.
Musicbrainz is the obvious central place for this - it's an open database maintained by volunteers. It's the main data source that drives New Music Tracker, for everything released already. It's a really great project.
It does include future releases but I think may be more sparse. I have been meaning to check how well it would work for upcoming stuff
Every year I do a "best of" poll for folks on my music mailing list, and I've longed to build a form using the musicbrainz API to allow folks to select from a list of releases on the year, and then based on that, have it include other metrics that I could summarize in the aggregate (genre, release date, band origin etc) - because I am hand-entering that info now.
Anyway - if I had the skill set to use a program like R to scrape the musicbrainz API, I could probably use it to build out something like Gabbie's proposed site. Full disclosure: I don't have that skill set, but I work around tons of people who do (they're unfortunately just not as new-music-crazed as me)
I don't even start looking until Friday mornings because I find the advance calendars so useless. I start with Allmusic, then NPR, then later in the morning Pitchfork and Brooklyn Vegan, Paste in the afternoon. I add to listen to list as the day goes on. Plus, of course, my online dorky music communities always have something to say about new releases. Keeps me plenty busy.
I’m somewhat reconciled to the fact that I’ll likely miss out on great new music because I have no reliable way of hearing about everything. On the flip side, because I’m plugged in to the MusicStack universe and I am actively browsing a variety of sites/tools/DSPs for new music, I’m also finding amazing music that I otherwise wouldn’t have discovered if I didn’t go looking.
I know there’s a dream app out there just waiting to be willed into reality but until then I’ll just keep finding music organically and be satisfied with whatever great new music does make its way to me.
my note - I am actively shocked at how bad discovery is in Bandcamp. It should be easy. Things are tagged. sales are recorded. release dates dated. but something as simple as "Show me the top selling post-hardcore albums released this month" is IMPOSSIBLE to do in their system. HOW?! If I set "Best Selling" to "This Week", it shows me the top selling album of THIS WEEK, not that released this week. Not to mention they should also be able to have and/or for tagging, etc. It's so weak and it seems like it would be trivial to make it better, and discovery is the first step to increasing sales...
At any rate, I love midwest emo, so I've come up with my own release calendar solution. on Friday, I go to bandcamp, and I set tag to "Midwest Emo", Digital Releases, New Arrivals, and This Week. there's about 20 releases a week this way across all of bandcamp.
I then open every release in a tab and listen to at least 10 seconds of each one. I know, not a lot of time, but with 20 releases, I can't listen to all them in full of course, and about 15 of them are typically what I would euphemistically call "amateur projects". the remaining 5 I'll give real listens to, and if I like them, buy them (and often their backlog). Then I'll try and share around the best of the best.
The problem of course, is this is only sustainable because I am hyper-specific on the music I am searching.
What if there were dedicated people who did this work for all different genres? We could call them "music journalists". Then we could aggregate all these music journalists, and that could be a "music publication". Ahh, another beautiful dream...
Until then, I am no music journalist, and I'll continue on this amateur project of my own :)
Dude I could write a screed about how terrible Bandcamp is for organized discovery. They are one of my go to outlets but I'm so consistently frustrated!!
This has always been a problem for me. Trying to keep up with releases has been a headache. I used to just follow Pitchfork and see what they were saying, but back then I just listened to the most popular indie like Vampire Weekend and Arcade Fire. I'll give some of those site you mention a shot. I agree, some further explanation on each release would help.
Your mock-up for the Weird Weather album reminds me of what reviews looked like in Option Magazine, which I think is long gone. It was great, though. Almost every page of each issue was just reviews of new music, spanning many genres. They were very info-focused.
I don't think I know it! Too bad it's not around anymore. It really is such a big effort to create and maintain such a thing. I think everyone would have to collectively agree on a system
Agreed, the system is important. It looks like the magazine started in 1989 and ended in 1998. I'm surprised to see it was LA-based. I assumed it was Canadian, I think because I bought an issue at an HMV in Toronto when on vacation. But I saw it in American record stores, too, in the Detroit area.
I can't paste the link to it here, but there's a good Wikipedia page about it.
In its early days, Alternative Press also had a good system for reviews with RIYL recommendations and ratings that made sense.
Do you know about linernotd.com and the IG account album thealbumscolector? (which I wish I could link to). They're made by the same people, and I've found them to be a great resource for album releases. Very granular genre descriptions, and lots of details in addition to label info, like country of origin, language, mood descriptors, something they call "hype level," which seems to be pretty subjective and arbitrary, but still. I'm starting to really rely on both sites for interesting new music, and would recommend either one or both.
That does sound familiar,I think I might follow them but it doesn't really show up on my feed. The trouble is you really have to go digging for this stuff!! Thanks for the tips
You definitely do have to dig! I just discovered them by accident (now and then the algorithm hits a bullseye, I guess) but I'm happy to share if it's helpful.
I don't check release calendars at all, I just read about new music here, and a few other spots, but I think that this could be the impetus for a band name like "Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers" because with no context at all I'm still going to check that out.
I definitely love the idea of the mockup, as it's sort of all of the information I want as well. As someone who's been learning to build apps this year, I think the trickiness comes down to being able to scrape all of that information off the internet; otherwise it becomes manual entry, whether by the app owner or the musicians/publicists.
Maybe if there's a reliable resource, people would be motivated to fill out their upcoming releases with all of those fields. I could see a niche working like that for smaller artists, but then maybe not the same effort put in by the bigger fish. It's definitely hard to make a one-size fits all solution!
Yeah it would all definitely rely on agreement from way too many players. I assumed it would have to be manual by somebody with pretty much infinite free time and enough personal wealth to do this just for fun
In January of 2025, I sat down and went through the Wikipedia listing of album release dates for 2025. But, yeah, I basically wrote down bands I already knew. The couple of websites I had bookmarked for new releases were just too much for me to make heads or tails of. I quickly abandoned my idea of spending time listening to new music that way. I mostly listened on recommendations and stuff I liked on my local alternative station.
This year, I have made an actual effort! I start with the no ripcord release calendar because at least it has genre. I am going to say that Spotify has been the biggest source though (may not be a popular one). As I was listening to an enormous amount of stuff in December, I clicked “follow” on every artist I liked. If they had a new album coming out, I clicked “presave.” I’ve also used the no ripcord list to presave albums in Spotify. Every Friday, I also listen to a couple of Spotify playlists highlighting new singles, when I hear stuff I like, I go check to see if there’s a new album coming and presave it.
Every Friday, I go listen to any albums I’ve presaved first, then I go check no ripcord to see if there was anything else that caught my eye (but, yes, with the lack of info, I’m going on genre alone here).
One of the local record stores (it’s actually two stores that are related, most of the time both owners are there) does a segment on the local alternative station on Friday mornings talking about new releases. They only talk about titles they’ve ordered. I know from talking to them that one owner mostly decides what to order by the record label (if there isn’t name recognition). Their list to order from is just titles and record labels. The other owner will go listen to singles and have listening parties with his employees to decide what to order (his store is bigger and he has more ability to take chances on stuff).
Whatever they talk about that sounds good, I add to my list if it isn’t already on it. There’s always a few things that aren’t on other lists.
I also check the Discord to see what other people are talking about.
I have checked the MOPS site a few times, but I mostly do all my listening on Fridays and over the weekend. I need to remember to go there on Mondays! Especially since indie/alternative is my main preferred genre.
I would love to have a release calendar that gives more info! Especially the RIYL piece.
Great to hear you find it useful, Kristin. I’ve started highlighting more releases in there to provide a little context. Can you think of anything else that would make it more useful?
They are absolutely overwhelming, so I release a list of what I liked from the last week every Thursday, but that is essentially too late because everyone is looking forward to Friday already.
I do use release calendars though, and like you wish there were some quick descriptors. MOPS is great, and I’m glad they’re back from the short hiatus. Shatter the standard is completely overwhelming, but does use genre descriptors so it’s a little easier to visually filter out what you might be looking for. On X there are a few guys I follow that seem to have pre-filtered their drop list every Friday, Ruben//Check the Rhyme, and Jah Talks Music are my go to hip hop guys. Brad Luttrell, and Modern Country Music That Doesn’t Suck, are my Americana/Country guys. AlbumsColector on insta is my metal plug, and YOU are my indie/post-punk guru!
I kinda ignore them! I find them overwhelming because as you've noted it's just a list of stuff and I have no idea what some of it is, and the list isn't terribly helpful. I do find MOPS and ..well, you (and your Discord) helpful, and then of course there's stuff I'm excited about coming out that I track of myself. But good stuff comes to me by way of recommendations, which is why resources like the ones you've mentioned are so helpful.
I think MOPS actually is where it's at but that has to be a tremendous amount of work and I sincerely don't know how Mariana does it (I know she had to take a break for a bit).
haha it IS a lot!! I literally spend the whole week hunting down links and putting it all together, but I love to share music! The break was just some family stuff going on but I'm back now :) So glad you like it! <3
Can't thank you for enough for all your hard work! And take all the breaks you need, for whatever the reason. :)
I don’t use anything like this at all but that’s really because I have reconciled myself to being way behind on most new releases. (I have taken your less is more instruction to heart and am enjoying sitting with fewer albums a bit more!) Where I am ahead of the game, it will be with small bands that I’ve seen play support gigs and subsequently kept track of. As someone who spends a lot of time in live music venues, this works well for me but is obviously fairly limited. I find it quite hard to go and check things out when all I have is a name (even a FFO doesn’t really drive me to listen.) There tends to be a cumulative effect that I will hear a name mentioned by a few people and at some point it will compel me to investigate. If someone tells me specifically that they think I’ll like something, I always appreciate that and will definitely check it out. I agree that release calendars are like festival line ups. You are scanning for the familiar names rather than using them for discovery. I don’t know if that’s always a bad thing though. Personally, I think I’d be more annoyed at missing a release from an artist I know I like than from a new one.
The festival lineup comparison is perfect!
ur mockup is actually great, i obsessively used to go through stereogums release calendar and just look for band names i thought sounded good, but i def ended up missing a lot of good shit because of it.
ok but this is actually a valid way to discover new bands imo. judge books by their covers, i say!
Oh wow, I can't believe I got a mention, thanks so much Gabbie!
New Music Tracker is just starting out and a lot of what you want I have been thinking about as well. RIYL is tricky as I want it to be curator driven rather than algorithmic. The general direction I want for the site is more of a curation platform, eventually one where curators can get paid for the work they're doing already
It's awesome and I hope it goes places
Where can we find your New Music Tracker?
It's here - newmusictracker.com
I really need to get better at promoting it!
Lovely! Thank you, bookmarked 🫡
My weeks are super uneven. Some weeks I have much more time than others to dig.
I would love a release calendar that listed everything and was heavily filterable. I want to filter genre, label, RIYL, release length (single, EP, LP), links to streamers, associations, etc. Basically all the fields you included in your card @gabbie.
This is a super tall order if this info is coming from the calendar operator given the volume of releases, but I think if there is a framework established that makes entering this information part of the process for the label to release the album, it would be possible to pull all the metadata along programmatically without a ton of friction or effort.
Give those who are building more data to include or not include, rather than them having to tack it on post facto.
i would absolutely love if this info were available somewhere central
The best path, I think, to getting something like this in place would be to have the framework created, then present to the labels for adoption. Also, folks like DistroKid would need to be involved.
It is a win for all involved. In theory, such a framework gets the label more of an opportunity to send information along with their releases, which means more people are likely to bite, especially on new bands. All of us worm hunters get better insights and better tools to find new music. Folks who are on the sidelines also have tools available to them to find stuff they might love.
Musicbrainz is the obvious central place for this - it's an open database maintained by volunteers. It's the main data source that drives New Music Tracker, for everything released already. It's a really great project.
It does include future releases but I think may be more sparse. I have been meaning to check how well it would work for upcoming stuff
Every year I do a "best of" poll for folks on my music mailing list, and I've longed to build a form using the musicbrainz API to allow folks to select from a list of releases on the year, and then based on that, have it include other metrics that I could summarize in the aggregate (genre, release date, band origin etc) - because I am hand-entering that info now.
Anyway - if I had the skill set to use a program like R to scrape the musicbrainz API, I could probably use it to build out something like Gabbie's proposed site. Full disclosure: I don't have that skill set, but I work around tons of people who do (they're unfortunately just not as new-music-crazed as me)
I don't even start looking until Friday mornings because I find the advance calendars so useless. I start with Allmusic, then NPR, then later in the morning Pitchfork and Brooklyn Vegan, Paste in the afternoon. I add to listen to list as the day goes on. Plus, of course, my online dorky music communities always have something to say about new releases. Keeps me plenty busy.
“Heads” like heads up! music heads, etm
- Love the “Listen” vs “Buy” links
- RE: ratings. It’s personal, so make that a paid option. You can only add your private ratings if you’re buying space in the database.
A girl can dream....
I’m somewhat reconciled to the fact that I’ll likely miss out on great new music because I have no reliable way of hearing about everything. On the flip side, because I’m plugged in to the MusicStack universe and I am actively browsing a variety of sites/tools/DSPs for new music, I’m also finding amazing music that I otherwise wouldn’t have discovered if I didn’t go looking.
I know there’s a dream app out there just waiting to be willed into reality but until then I’ll just keep finding music organically and be satisfied with whatever great new music does make its way to me.
love your mockup... what a beautiful dream...
my note - I am actively shocked at how bad discovery is in Bandcamp. It should be easy. Things are tagged. sales are recorded. release dates dated. but something as simple as "Show me the top selling post-hardcore albums released this month" is IMPOSSIBLE to do in their system. HOW?! If I set "Best Selling" to "This Week", it shows me the top selling album of THIS WEEK, not that released this week. Not to mention they should also be able to have and/or for tagging, etc. It's so weak and it seems like it would be trivial to make it better, and discovery is the first step to increasing sales...
At any rate, I love midwest emo, so I've come up with my own release calendar solution. on Friday, I go to bandcamp, and I set tag to "Midwest Emo", Digital Releases, New Arrivals, and This Week. there's about 20 releases a week this way across all of bandcamp.
I then open every release in a tab and listen to at least 10 seconds of each one. I know, not a lot of time, but with 20 releases, I can't listen to all them in full of course, and about 15 of them are typically what I would euphemistically call "amateur projects". the remaining 5 I'll give real listens to, and if I like them, buy them (and often their backlog). Then I'll try and share around the best of the best.
The problem of course, is this is only sustainable because I am hyper-specific on the music I am searching.
What if there were dedicated people who did this work for all different genres? We could call them "music journalists". Then we could aggregate all these music journalists, and that could be a "music publication". Ahh, another beautiful dream...
Until then, I am no music journalist, and I'll continue on this amateur project of my own :)
Dude I could write a screed about how terrible Bandcamp is for organized discovery. They are one of my go to outlets but I'm so consistently frustrated!!
Co-sign. It took them YEARS to put a damn volume control on the player!
This has always been a problem for me. Trying to keep up with releases has been a headache. I used to just follow Pitchfork and see what they were saying, but back then I just listened to the most popular indie like Vampire Weekend and Arcade Fire. I'll give some of those site you mention a shot. I agree, some further explanation on each release would help.
Your mock-up for the Weird Weather album reminds me of what reviews looked like in Option Magazine, which I think is long gone. It was great, though. Almost every page of each issue was just reviews of new music, spanning many genres. They were very info-focused.
I don't think I know it! Too bad it's not around anymore. It really is such a big effort to create and maintain such a thing. I think everyone would have to collectively agree on a system
Agreed, the system is important. It looks like the magazine started in 1989 and ended in 1998. I'm surprised to see it was LA-based. I assumed it was Canadian, I think because I bought an issue at an HMV in Toronto when on vacation. But I saw it in American record stores, too, in the Detroit area.
I can't paste the link to it here, but there's a good Wikipedia page about it.
In its early days, Alternative Press also had a good system for reviews with RIYL recommendations and ratings that made sense.
Do you know about linernotd.com and the IG account album thealbumscolector? (which I wish I could link to). They're made by the same people, and I've found them to be a great resource for album releases. Very granular genre descriptions, and lots of details in addition to label info, like country of origin, language, mood descriptors, something they call "hype level," which seems to be pretty subjective and arbitrary, but still. I'm starting to really rely on both sites for interesting new music, and would recommend either one or both.
That does sound familiar,I think I might follow them but it doesn't really show up on my feed. The trouble is you really have to go digging for this stuff!! Thanks for the tips
You definitely do have to dig! I just discovered them by accident (now and then the algorithm hits a bullseye, I guess) but I'm happy to share if it's helpful.
I don't check release calendars at all, I just read about new music here, and a few other spots, but I think that this could be the impetus for a band name like "Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers" because with no context at all I'm still going to check that out.
More reason to have cool band names
I definitely love the idea of the mockup, as it's sort of all of the information I want as well. As someone who's been learning to build apps this year, I think the trickiness comes down to being able to scrape all of that information off the internet; otherwise it becomes manual entry, whether by the app owner or the musicians/publicists.
Maybe if there's a reliable resource, people would be motivated to fill out their upcoming releases with all of those fields. I could see a niche working like that for smaller artists, but then maybe not the same effort put in by the bigger fish. It's definitely hard to make a one-size fits all solution!
Yeah it would all definitely rely on agreement from way too many players. I assumed it would have to be manual by somebody with pretty much infinite free time and enough personal wealth to do this just for fun