• Rate Your Music charts or lists

If you don’t have a problem with sharing your listening data:

• Last.fm (for example, check “similar to” section of artist pages or “similar albums” of album pages)
• ListenBrainz, a free and open source alternative to Last.fm (for example, Music Neighbourhood, ListenBrainz Radio, or the “Created for you” playlists (they have been criticised by people for having too little variety, but according to the devs this will increase as more people use the service))

Or you can just ask people for recommendations.

It doesn’t help any one else unfortunately.
But I subscribed to Google Play Music All Access during the original promo in 2013. Part of $7.99 promo deal way back then, was that it was a Lifetime Subscription. Even after raising the price on all the 2014 YouTube Red promo users at the beginning of 2024, I’m still locked in at $7.99. I’ve de-Googled nearly everything else, but I’ll hold on to that subscription till I die, or YouTube does.

I start playing music on YT music, and if there’s anything I like I will pirate it

radiofreefedi.net

I mostly look the reddits or here on Lemmy communitys of the genre I like. I also look at what bands tour with who and give there songs a listen.

But I have also came across a website called coreradio(.)online and it has been great for piracy and discovery of that genre (metalcore and other metals/rock ) as well. No idea if there are similar sites out there for other genres.

Lidarr Import List might interest you. You can say connect to Spotify’s playlists for top hits and have it auto add the albums to your library. Then you can use metadata on the music for smart playlists.

I’ve been using last.fm for, I guess, decades now. Looking at what my “neighbors” are listening to is the most helpful.

Soulseek. I’ll search a band I like, then browse the directories of other people with similar taste.

this is something i’m trying to figure out myself, so i’m right there with you 😅

the best thing i’ve done so far is to visit various public tracker sites and look at the trending torrents for music over different time frames.

i’ve also been just combing through different DJ sets, playlists, and allowing the almighty algorithm on YouTube take me to new places, and then I download the ones that i like. almost crate digging, but digitally :)

keen to see what others say, though.

I’d like an indexer good enough to show me real music close enough to what I get generatively from a suno.com prompt. :3

I jsut stream radio music in genres I like. There’s like a zillion different stations out there.

I use RadioDroid from F Droid.

What do all you die hard pirates do to discover new bands?

1. Find DJs I like on Twitch. (Many of them copy shows to Mixcloud too, so you can listen later, but track IDs may only be on the live show.)
2. When I hear a song I like, grab the discography from one of the usual sources.

I have discovered so much great new music via Twitch, but I am sure not every genre is well supplied with good DJs.

Orpheus has a spiderweb map of similar artists at the bottom of every artist page. It’s not as in-depth as WCD’s was (RIP) but it’s serviceable!

Maybe this? https://nuclear.js.org/

Maybe not exacly what you’re looking for but www.chosic.com has a bunch of tools for recommending similar artists and songs.