How My Content Discovery Habits Are Changing

rurutia

I've noticed my ways of finding new music, podcasts, and even interesting YouTube channels have shifted recently. For years, I was pretty reliant on Spotify's Discover Weekly or YouTube's algorithm, and while they still throw up some good stuff, I feel like I'm hitting a bit of a recommendation echo chamber. It's like they keep showing me variations of what I already like, making true discovery harder.

Lately, I've been getting more recommendations from smaller, niche online communities and forums focused on specific interests. Reading through discussions or "what are you listening to" threads has been gold. It's more manual, sure, but the quality of suggestions feels more curated and less… algorithmically generic. It’s refreshing to find things that genuinely surprise me. How about you? Are your go-to discovery methods changing? Still sticking with the big platform algorithms, or are you exploring other avenues for that fresh content fix? I'm curious about what's working for others.

Rubben

When we're strictly talking about music I feel like YouTube's algorhythm for recommending new songs that I have not heard yet but might like was much better like 7-8 years ago.

So what I've resorted to is that:

• When I hear a song that I like and that clearly samples another song / melody, I look them up on whosampled but see if there are any more songs I could like
• If I like a song I'll look up what genre it is exactly and find songs from that specific genre and I generally find more songs that I really like. That's how I came to realize I absolutely love slap house songs and moombahton.

Definitely more tedious

Levi

Soundcloud algo is good. And quality is decent.

jar

Enjoy because the moment enough others catch on to it and join you, it’ll become harder and harder to determine between organic and dishonest marketing.

Frankly, I’ve found ChatGPT to be quite objective in helping me find things I didn’t know about. Music, movies, products. To the point that I would honestly say my quality of life has improved as a result. I’ve never felt my Google skills were lacking, but these days Google isn’t objective and the search engines that are have major shortcomings.

ValdikSS

I'm on Soulseek, and it has one-on-one chats.

Many people who download from me recommend something back, and I listen to everything they send. Sometimes it's a really good stuff.
There was one person who sent me his most loved releases monthly, literally a curated advice.

Apart from that, Bandcamp sometimes recommend me good stuff based on my buying history, and I still scrobble everything to last.fm which I check from time to time.

davide

@ValdikSS: DC++ has collections too sometimes. It lets you see what directories and files other p2p users share; sometimes these directories are organized.

ValdikSS

@davide, yes, there's not much people on DC++ anymore unfortunately. I used to run the hub, and I still present on most of hubs (with Schare as well)

nghialele

Soulseek & Bandcamp

I also looking at new sources for my music & looking at exchange it like soulseek. I want to improve my DJs collection which I never play.