There are several ways that I discover new music. They are all intentful and do not rely on automatic recommendation or randomness:
- Following the trail of session musicians involved in albums that I like. For example, I've had great pleasure discovering Justin Adams' albums from his work with Robert Plant.
- Following the trail of record producers
- Browsing through albums of a given label that puts out albums I like
I think there are many options between music streaming and reverting to 70s technology for music discovery.
As an avid listener, I've been assiduously building a digital music library since the year 2000. I started buying physical CDs, mostly used and in bulk, only to find that they are an impossibly huge burden when moving countries, which I did twice in the intervening years. I slowly moved to digital by ripping everything I could lay my hands on to FLAC, doing my best to scan all the booklets into PDF along the way. I believe I'm mostly done with my local public library's CD stock - at least for the music that interests me. I dig deep in so-called world music and large collections like magazine compilations. I usually collect whole series and I have a soft spot for cover versions of important composers.
To host all this (around 10TB today), I am running a Synology server and I'm backing up the whole thing to Backblaze. Synology has helpful apps for all platforms that allow connecting and listening to the music. I am using an old tablet as music player, connected to portable speakers around the house. It works great!
It's been my pleasure to share music discoveries with my friends and family. What's missing is a very good way to navigate this massive library in the many dimensions of the music universe.
Asking here because I'm lazy to do my own research:
Are there music players that allow searching by credit? E.g. albums produced by Rick Rubin, or tracks where Justin Adams plays guitar. This kind of information is usually available on Discogs or MusicBrainz.
I want to be hired to build Web-based music applications. I have very good experience in this domain, currently working on extending the open source music engraving engine Verovio with support for microtonality and better MusicXML import.
I'm pursuing my vision of "music-i18n": Open source music software that works for microtonal music and worldwide musical cultures.
It's not a from-scratch effort, quite the contrary: I'm trying to tie in existing music standards (MIDI, MusicXML, SMuFL, MEI, etc.) and ensure that FOSS systems (MuseScore, Verovio, smaller components) implement enough of those standards to support music-i18n.
Sometimes, this also includes extending the standards themselves when they are not fully capable of representing some non-mainstream musical aspect. For example, MusicXML lacks the ability of representing multiple accidentals per note (whereas MEI does), which is a must for microtonality.
I started down this path around 2018, as a music player who got interested in arranging Arabic songs in a "Real Book" style. It opened a giant rabbit hole that I'm still far from having fully explored.
Now and then, I collaborate with other devs who are interested in adjacent topics. I would love to hear from some of you here!