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226 points cloudfudge | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.193s | source
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freedomben ◴[] No.41882074[source]
I think this is great, but I do hope thought is being put into solving the hardest problem of all IMHO: Music Discovery

I have bought a lot on Bandcamp, but would have bought 10x more if I could just find stuff I liked. The existing system makes discovery nearly impossible unless you happen to like the stuff being mainly bought and curated or are in a lucky genre.

Discoverability is especially hard because 99% of the music people create sucks. This may not seem true if you mainly listen to "radio" and playlists, but if you ever get access to a large catalog of independent music, try picking stuff at pseudo-random and take notes. As much as I love good art (and I do), most art is not good art. You can't go on popularity because some of the great artists (especially on Bandcamp) are relatively unknown and therefore are not popular. For example, Thousand Needles in Red is a phenomenal band with great albums, and almost completely unknown. These Four Walls is similar (but at least they are on Youtube Music/Spotify/etc). I'd buy the crap out of similar albums, but discovering them is very challenging. I mainly found those two out of random luck.

Anyway I'm rambling, but I do hope you can figure out a good means for discovery. I think finding and grouping people with similar tastes is among the best ways, and also having artists that a person likes recommend other artists can be super valuable.

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1. anigbrowl ◴[] No.41884081[source]
This is what DJs and record labels are for. As I've pointed out many times before, the very understandable hostility of the public toward major labels that inflict inequitable terms on artists early in their career has been applied to dismiss all labels in favor of platforms. Small independent labels actually do a ton to support and build up artists outside of mainstream genres, while many (most?) platforms are as bad as major labels in their own way. Imagine if you went to the record store in the pre-internet days, and they were giving away singles or whole albums for free, but there were ads mixed in with the music and if you tried to move the needle/forward the cassette past them, they'd break your hifi.