Splooge: Finding New Music
/Do you use google sheets to keep track of your music listening or artists? How do you find new music? Is there an app like letterboxed or something (I've googled and searched and would not bug with this email if I'd found something great). —TH
I’m a big believer in the importance of music in people’s lives.
I know some people don’t really care about music. They give it no thought.
People who will go on a road trip and just drive along in silence, accompanied only by the sound of their tires on the pavement and their own Slim-Jim-farts muted against the car seat.
People whose first dance wedding song was At Last by Etta James because…well… I don’t know. Seems good enough.
People who don’t have a carefully curated sex mix for when they hook up with someone new. They just pop in this CD of “Cool Rock” and pump away.
But for most people, music is (or at one point was) an essential element to their lives. Essential for connection to the world around them. Essential for feeling out and processing emotions.
Despite that, if I ask most people over the age of 28 to name three new bands from the last 5 years, they will be unable to do so.
When we’re young, music can feel so vital, but still a time comes for most people where they’re just listening to stuff they already know or the occasional new song they’ve become familiar with because it’s overplayed on the radio.
Unless you have a system or a process to keep new music coming into your life, it can be easy to get left behind and fall off the path of keeping current.
Here is the system I use to find new music.
There are two aspects to it.
The Scattershot Approach
Every week, Apple Music puts out a New Music Playlist that is based on the music you already listen to. (I assume Spotify does something similar).
So once a week I’ll go through that list and note bands that I already like that have released new music. I’ll add those albums to a list of albums I want to check out.
I’ll also skim through the other music in the playlist and see if there’s anything else that appeals to me. Any song that sounds good, I’ll add to a Weekly Music mix that I’ll listen to throughout the following week.
At the end of the week, I’ll reassess the songs in that mix:
If I decide I’m not that into them, I’ll delete them.
If I like the songs, I’ll add them to a playlist that is sort of my Personal Radio Station. This playlist consists of all the music that is new to me over the past year.
If I love the songs, then I’ll make it a point to look more into the band and get their latest full album.
The Birthday Candle Approach
When you’re using a match to light candles on a birthday cake, you light the first candle, and then you use that candle to light the other candles.
Similarly, when I find a band I like, I use that band to find more new music.
I find out what bands this group has toured with
If they’re on a niche label, I look into other bands on that label
I find out if the members are in other bands
You can also use this site called Music Map to enter a band name and see what other bands are similar to them.
But perhaps the most fruitful technique along these lines is the following, which works best for more obscure artists. When I find a band I really like that isn’t that well known, I’ll put that band name into google, along with “best of,” their album name, and the year their album came out.
For example, last year I got into a Chicago indie band called Cusp.
So I put Cusp “best of” “you can do it all” 2023 into google.
And that search leads me to some other people who also thought this emerging band had one of the best albums of the year. And then I can see what other bands they were into, which will likely lead me to some other music I might appreciate, because we’ve already demonstrated similar taste for this lesser known thing.
Obviously, it’s not quite as significant if we share an appreciation for something that’s wildly popular. “Oh, you like Marvel movies? Crazy! Me too!” That doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll share other similar tastes. But when you find someone who appreciates the same unsigned band, independent film, small-town, or out-of-the-way restaurant, you can often use them to guide you towards other things that will appeal to you as well.
The final thing to do is to make listening to new music part of a habit.
For me, I try to listen to my Weekly Music mix (which is a few songs long) and a newly released album each day. Usually it’s the same album for about a week. So that’s about 45 minutes to an hour a day of listening to music. I’m doing other stuff at the same time. I’m not just sitting in a chair staring into the void.
At the end of the week, I’ll decide what songs from the Weekly Music mix and the new album are going to go into my Personal Radio Station and I transfer them over. I listen to the Personal Radio Station whenever I’m in the mood to listen to new-ish music.
Then, once a month, I take anything from my Personal Radio Station that was added more than a year ago, and I transfer those songs into my primary playlist of all the songs on my Apple Music.
This system requires something like Spotify or Apple Music to work. But if you’re the sort of person who is going to benefit from an influx of new music in your life, then you should already be subscribed to one of those.