Thanks for all the posts! I won't reply to each one individually, but I'd like to clarify I mostly use Spotify as my personal radio station, with hopes of discovering new stuff or just casually listen to music when I'm at home doing chores and I'm online anyway. It's just an opportunity for me to check out songs and albums without having to buy them first, similar to those listening stations in record stores. I still got my vinyl, CD and mp3 collections and I support artists I really like by buying their music. So I don't see this as an alternative to the traditional ways of listening to music, but as an addition. That being said, I don't know of any cool record stores anymore that are fun to browse, unfortunately. And some things I'm looking for aren't easy to find in retail stores either (e.g. stuff in other languages than English, German or French).
ciomalau: i can give you my vlc playlist - all songs i first listen to them before adding to playlist so there's nothing bad in it at least for me. it has 98 hours 40 minutes
Thanks for the offer, but that's precisely what I'm
not looking for. I'd prefer shorter, heavily curated playlists containing music that *I* am very likely to enjoy, no random suggestions of music that other people like. ;)
Maighstir: I don't use streaming services, as I prefer to not be dependant on an internet connection. I do, however, use Bandcamp, and sometimes rather randomly check out their lists of what's new or best-selling, possibly also filtered by whatever genre the artist thought fit to tag the release as.
Isn't Bandcamp a streaming service dependent on internet connection as well, as long you don't pay for the downloads? ;) Granted, you don't need to log into an account to stream the music, so I can see the difference. I like Bandcamp, too.
nightcraw1er.488: That being said, the best way to find out about music you would like is to look at festival lineups, they tend to bunch certain types together. Check out bands websites, see who they are touring with etc.
PaterAlf: When I use Bandcamp I normally use the tags to find the kind of music I like and feel in the mood for. Might have to try some bands and titles to find something I like, but after that I use the suggestions of the bands I've found (if they have any).
On my internet radio I use the name of a band I like and the radio will give me suggestions for stations that play similar music.
Those are good suggestions, but they'd require active work on my part, which is totally fine, I already do similar stuff, like googling "best of [insert genre/type of music] [insert year of release]" blog articles or checking what people who bought my favorite albums on amazon also listen to etc. But the ideal thing would be playlists I could just listen to while doing other stuff and that feature various artists (not several songs by the same few bands), some of which I might not know yet. The automatic "skip to next video" function of youtube sometimes does that for me, but what I'd really like is curated playlists by people with similar taste.
Vitek: What about using radio feature?
You pick song, album or band and run radio based on it and it
should play songs similar to your starting thing genre.
I find it a bit weird sometimes and it tends to repeat songs from the original band a bit too much but it still helped me to find some new stuff.
I guess your suggestion comes closest to what I'm looking for. I already know of this function but I keep forgetting about it. I should use it more often. :)
Thanks again, to everyone!
