Sep 9 - How to Find New Music

I can’t play an instrument, speak any other language but English, or really do any sport. One thing I can do is find obscure albums. I want to share this knowledge with the world. It’s been one of my favorite hobbies for probably several years now. There are many ways to find music. This isn’t really about finding lost albums; if I can’t find it through YouTube or file sharing, I just give up. There are several methods! So I will go over a few.

Discogs:
I don’t personally use Discogs to find music, more so just to confirm it’s existence and look at packaging I find interesting. The website, to my knowledge, is mostly for buying and selling. Although, It’s not an imperfect method.
“Find Music”
For this, you want to go to the Explore Discography button then click Explore All. There, you can look through styles and genres as well as select multiple to find something that fits a niche of yours. You can also select country, format, decade, etc.

RYM:
This is the method I definitely use the most. I use Rateyourmusic.com to find labels, artists, and even genres or styles. There’s so many different ways to explore the website. Although made for rating music, it's also just a great archive of music. I can only really cover a few ways to explore so as to not seem too biased.
Genres
Just going down a genre you find can lead you to so many releases. On the website, a description of the genre as well as a top 10 based off score.

Charts
You can use charts to find records rated highly from a certain year or decade, but you can also use filters to fill a certain niche. Go to the top of the page and select charts, then scroll down. Select Top (highest rated,), Popular (most number of ratings), Esoteric (highly rated but low number of ratings), Or Diverse. Then, you can select by release (albums, EPs, mixtapes, etc), then year/decade. Under this is a search bar where you can select location, genre, and descriptors.

Lists
There are many user-made lists on the site. You can search for them or scroll through them by category, featured lists, etc. 

Labels
Telling somebody to find music via labels is kinda vague, so let me explain. What I mean by this is finding label websites, or their pages on bandcamp, discogs or Rateyourmusic. 

here’s some more label sites:


Record stores
 This one is pretty simple. You go to the record store, find something interesting, and listen to it. My favorite record store is The Record Ship in Wichita, where I found an awesome Dean Friedman record a few months back. If you’re a Wichita metalhead, you already know about The Gate, I’m sure, but it’s worth shouting out.

Asking around
 Asking somebody you find cool what music they like works sometimes. I've found several bands from friends, but that's a bit of a prerequisite.

Everynoise
Everynoise.com is a website full, top to bottom, of categorized music genres. Created by former Spotify Genre Guy™, the website shows many music genres with example artists and audio. It's incredibly vast. 

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