“Find everything yourself”: how to choose music for work and relaxation without the help of recommendation systems.

There are options for finding new music, and there are many. Last time, we focused on music platforms, email newsletters, and podcasts.Today, we will discuss how online exhibitions, studying labels, and exploring microgenres help in solving this task.

“Find everything yourself”: how to choose music for work and relaxation without the help of recommendation systems.Photo: Edu Grande. Source: Unsplash.com

Digital exhibitions

Recently, in one of our digests, we took a look at an improvised online exhibition of audio equipment: sharing new releases and interviews with developers. But this year, almost all music festivals are online. In the spring, SXSW was held in this format, and they even uploaded a playlist of 747 tracks from its participants on YouTube. The selection of new music from the festival on Spotify turned out to be almost twice as extensive — with 1359 songs, and there's also a playlist version for Apple Music..

Curators select tracks for such playlists, so you can confidently listen to them without worrying about wasting time. Even if you aren't a fan of traveling to the offline versions of such events, their digital format will help you discover a vast number of new bands.

By the way, in March 2021, SXSW will be held again there will be online. [If you want to learn more about the history of the festival and its IT components, there's a dedicated post on Habr] ..]

Labels and Producers

If you take a closer look at what a particular record label is releasing, besides the tracks already on your playlist, you can find many interesting things. However, this approach should only be applied to smaller labels focused on specific styles. Researching the output of music industry giants will take much more time and effort.

“Find everything yourself”: how to choose music for work and relaxation without the help of recommendation systems.Photo: Andreas Forsberg. Source: Unsplash.com

Additionally, it’s worth exploring the work of producers who collaborated with your favorites. There's a chance they worked with all the musicians on the label or prepared something interesting for other record companies. By the way, this search isn't a unique solution for the music world and is widely used for selecting books and even software.

A closely related niche for analysis is participants in remix contests, often held by well-known bands — for example, Klayton Albert (Klayton Albert), who represents projects like Celldweller and Scandroid.. He hosts regular contests for musicians at his label FiXT Music. Here’s an example of a playlist with 70 tracks from participants of one of those contests.

The final hint — artists and bands that accompany well-known headliners on tours. Finding such information will take time, but the results may be interesting to listen to.

Micro-genre maps

Their advantage lies in the quick transition to exploring new genres. If you’re interested in discovering projects in this area, take a look at Every Noise At Once. Just decide on your choice using the text search on the page (or display micro-genres as a list), listen to a sample and look for something similar on your favorite streaming service.

“Find everything yourself”: how to choose music for work and relaxation without the help of recommendation systems.Image: DarTar. Source: Wikimedia

Another project in this area is Music Map. [Example of a map of artists similar to Yelawolf.]

] But its developer specializes in search and discovery tasks not only in the music field. A similar mechanism is used in his second project — Product Chart. The project allows you to analyze and compare laptops, smartphones, and various computer hardware.. Furthermore, the author of this music navigator proposed an engaging methodology for time tracking.

P.S. Our exploration of options for discovering new music doesn’t end here. In our next articles, we’ll discuss how to approach friendly music recommendations, cover the diversity of the web radio world, and see how else you can find truly great tracks.

What else do we have on Habr:

Source: habr.com

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