My Top 10+ Music Discovery Tools
Tools, apps, websites, browser extensions that boost my daily music discoveries
Did you find yourself stuck when looking for new music to listen to ? I personnaly experienced it dozens of time. This moment, where you feel the will to listen to music, don’t want to listen to things you already know, or simply have to particular envy towards your already-made playlists, and want to listen to something new, but do not know what.
As a developer, it is very common for me to listen to music when working. What’s more, I found an increasing need to fill the silence of my home office with music, as I work remotely. I consider it as part of the essentials elements to maintain the flow. That’s why I have aggregated a set of tools to answer this need of discovery. Despite being a Spotify user, I will try to be as platform-agnostic as possible.
First, let’s check some specific music explorations platform.
Music Map
The Music Map is part of a wider project named Gnod (Global Network of Discovery), illustrating proximity between artists.
Discogs
Discogs is a great database regrouping thousands of albums, organized by genre and style. Browsing the most rated albums/artists by genre may be a good start to discover a genre you do not know this much.
WhoSampled
This tool is fantastic to find what samples are being used in a track. Sometimes, you here a track in which you guess there are some samples, but without being able to say where they come from. With whosampled, it becomes super fast to figure out. Did you know Daft Punk sampled George Duke’s I Love You more for Digital Love ? Yeah, that was an easy one, but you can even challenge the database to try to find artists with no relations under 5 degrees of sample/cover. You might be surprised by the results…
Moreover, whosampled can also identify remixes and covers for a given track.
Shazam
Ok, I bet you already know this song-recognition mobile app. But did you know you also could search tracks by lyrics ? In case you remember the lyrics but not the title… You just need to click the little search icon under the main Shazam button.
IndieShuffle
IndieShuffle is a free platform providing new daily indie music.
When you really like a track and thinks “Oh, what a pitty I can’t find very similar songs !” (c’mon, I’m not the only one to have had this thought), well, maybe you could… thanks to the following set of tools.
MusicTax
This service interfaced with Spotify bases its analysis on the data provided by the Spotify metadata, that are listed below any title you search (popularity, danceability, energy, instumentality, and “valence”, which corresponds to positivity, in addition to the rythm and tonality), in addition to BPM and loudness. Below all those informations, you will find a set of similar tracks. The propositions of the service may not always be perfectly accurate, nevertheless it may provide some interesting discoveries.
What is more, the service provides a page to check all the latest releases, and other trending Spotify lists.
Musictax is free, donations are welcome
Chosic
Chosic is a library of super-useful tools to find music, here are the ones I prefer :
Have you ever wondered “to wich genre this particular song belongs ? It would be so handy to search similar songs/artists…” ? The Chosic Music Genre Finder may help toward this goal. It gives you Spotify and LastFM tags related to a track, and additionnally provides you links to the next tool I want to talk about.
Chosic can provide you a list of songs similar to an initial track used to find tracks in the same style. Also works with artists or genre.
This one recommends other artists or bands similar to the one you provide as a search.
These are the three platform agnostic tools I find very useful but be sure to check out the other ones Chosic provide !
Chosic is free, donations are welcome
Everynoise
Everynoise is a map similar to the music map of GNOD, but for music genres listed on Spotify. They even provide playlist for each of those genre. They also provide a search engine to give you the genres with which an artist is tagged.
Music discovery mediums can take other forms than interactive websites.
Online press
Online specialized press is another way to stay up-to-date about today’s music. You may find quite generalist magazines such as Pitchfork, or very specialized ones. As a french techno lover, I mainly follow french techno oriented medias, such as Traxx or Tsugi. Despite not being a huge fan of rap, I can only recommend the excellent media Backpackerz, of which my colleague Antoine Bosque is part.
In addition, those medias often provide newletter, to directly inform you about the latest music release in your mail inbox.
Podcasts
As for magazines, I essentially follow french podcasts. The JukeBox series by France Culture is a very interesting one through its historical, yet eclectic approach. Nova Classics focuses more on specific tracks.
(Web)radios
Some radios have very eclectic register and are ideal to discover new sounds. FIP and Nova are ideal for those purpose in France. What is more, with the arrival of the web, we now have webradios to provide even more style-specific and niche radios. Hotmix radios groups a set of 23 streams, each focused on a style, mood, or period.
Some of those services are hybrid between traditionnal editorial content and interactive tooling.
Last.fm
This one is a platform aggregating top streamed music, latest music news, and interactive recommandations and statistics related to your listenings. You can plug it to you music streaming tool, whatever it is, may it be Spotify, Deezer, or others that are supported. They also provid an android app and browser extensions to track your listenings on the go or on the web.
Last but not least, the site we browse everyday can also be a great source of inspiration…
YouTube
This free and universal tool is very efficient to discover new musical stuff thanks to a set of different behaviors and contents.
Mixes
One of the most interesting and platform specific content you can find on youtube, though they also massively exist on Soundcloud, are the mixes. There are almost a mix for every genre you can imagine. In this categoy, I also inclue DJ sets and mixtapes, in which you can often discover very rare and underground stuff. Searching the name of a specific genre works, but you can also search the name of specific DJs, or browse channels specialized in those kind of mixes, such as BarbWalters for future funk, or Boiler Room for EDM/House/techno.
Recommandations
YouTube can do this work of creating mixes automatically by enabling the autoplay to read the first suggestion after listening to a track. You can also manually select tracks suggested in recommandations after listening to a music.
Specialized channels
Nowadays, dozens of subjects are vulgarized on youtube, and music is no exception. Though some channels may focus on technical aspect of the music, they always reference famous bands or artists to illustrate their explanations. Once more, I essentially follow french stuff. PV Nova, Florent Garcia, Metalliquoi or Le Règlement are some of those. StevieTerreberry is a pretty good english one to me (notice it essentially focuses on metal, but I’m sure you can find some equivalents for rap music).
For people very fond of YouTube/YouTube music experience, a non-official open-source desktop client exists, providing several useful add-ons. You can find it at https://th-ch.github.io/youtube-music/.
Wikipedia
This one sounds like an obvious one, yet I think it may be underrated and quite often forgoten. Wikipedia, on each main genre page, has links to artists related to this genre, but above all, links to all sub-genre connected to this one, which may be very underground.
FB Groups
Being part of facebook groups focused on music sharing is a great way to discover new artists or titles, even if this group is only composed of closed friends and is not composed by hundreds of people. The most important thing is to know the kind of music shared between those people and how much you will be interested by them. There’s no point to join a group in which you will click on one publication a year.
Conclusion
This list is far from being exhaustive. There are platforms that I don’t use at all which may be a great place to discover new music like tiktok, or tools I use, but not in this purpose, like Discord, which may have some music communities on it. There are also whole bunches of the music industry that just don’t interest me that much, like current rap music or tending pop music (no denigration at all). Though they are probably easier to reach, for example at the radio, or in Spotify’s Top 50, I assume I am an not very prepared to crawl them. Why not complete this toolset in comments ?
It is pleasant to listen to music when working, however listening to new music requires my brain an extra effort to analyse the new song I’m listening and therefore may be hard to manage, that’s why when I need to deeply concentrate, I prefer listening to music I already know, choosing other moments to make my new discoveries. Furthermore, I think we all agree to say discovering music is cool, but sometimes all we want is to listen the same 10 tracks in loop all the morning, don’t we ?
Bonus : for Spotify users
Spotify, despite not always favoritising discoveries in its autoplay mode, is a very interesting place to browse to discover new things. 50% of the time, I do not quit my spotify client to make new discoveries. Indeed, on Spotify, I benefit from recommandations, related artists, huge genre-specific playlists, but the part I like the most is stalking peers to see what they are listening to and browse their playlists (c’mon, I know I’m not the only one). But we Spotify users also have some external tools to helps us seeking new sounds.
Chosic
The site Chosic I presented earlier also have Spotify-only tools, like the Playlist search, enabling you to find playlist containing specific artists or songs.
The playlist miner
This one lets you find the songs appearing in most playlists related to a keyword, and create a synthetical playlist based on this or these keywords.
This one may be a little trickier to use. Their is an online version at http://playlistminer.playlistmachinery.com/, unfortunately it does provide SSL encryption. Using it, your Spotify credentials will not be compromised, but the application token associated with the app will, as well as the words you search. Fortunately, you can deploy your own instance of the service by using the code provided here : https://github.com/plamere/playlistminer. I may run my own and add the link below.
Enjoy !
