For pretty much the entirety of the past year/year-and-a-half, save for a few exceptions, 99% of my music listening revolved around video game soundtracks. They’re still in regular rotation but I am beginning to move on.

Part of what I hate about streaming services is how they constantly nag you to keep on discovering music as if that’s a good thing. Having used that sort of system before, you (well, at least I) end(ed) up forgetting a good chunk of songs that I liked in the pursuit of discovery. Ever since I started curating my own music collection, a lot of the urge for music discovery has died down. But that’s besides the point.

The point is, there are times when you’d like something new to listen to. Now, I have three main sources for this purpose.

1. Youtube

This sounds rather antithetical but wait! Firstly, I’m not talking about Youtube Music; I’m talking about bog-standard Youtube. I don’t know what it is about it but it often recommends music to me that is rather obscure. I’ll get completely random suggestions from bands/artists I’ve never heard of and I’ve found a fair few artists this way.

It works more often than I’d like it to.

2. Bandcamp

There’s one part of the Bandcamp website home page I really like:

Live updates of album purchases

You know, sometimes I like to sit there and what this carousel move. If a something here has nice album art, I might give it a try. Weird as it sounds, this works for me!

3. NTS

I don’t use this very often but I have used it 1 or 2 times in the past few months but I have gotten exactly 1 album in my collection this way. It remains to be seen if this is going to stay as a source of music discovery for me but I do like what I’ve gotten from here so far. Also? They have a great website!