Comment by aloukissas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aloukissas | Hacker News Reader

By far, the best way I've discovered new music is through radio. Find a station with producers that you jive with and this will be a treasure chest. I was lucky enough to grow up in Athens (GR), where radio is really, really good. A big disappointment happened when I moved to SF (which, aside of KCSM - a great jazz radio - is a music radio disappointment). I was lucky to come across KCRW from LA, perhaps the best radio station in the US. I've been a member since before it became my local radio station. Couple other notables are The Current (KCMP) and KEXP.

The other big (meta-) source is surrounding myself with people with similar (or not so similar, but still interesting) music tastes. I've discovered a TON of music like this.

Yes, I've discovered a few things from algorithmic recommendation systems (e.g. spotify). But: (a) the quality of the recommendations hasn't been even close as good, and more importantly (b) there is zero emotional connection (i.e. like saying "oh, this is the band that Eleni showed me when we were camping in Yosemite").

No radio stations have ever played the music I'm looking for so no, this doesn't work for me at all. The majority of stations play top 40, or top R&B/Urban (no idea what the PC description is), top country, class rock. Maybe if you live in LA or NYC there are some other stations with more eclectic selections like say KCRW in LA but I have no interest in what they play.

While great radio stations solve the issue of finding new music, finding great radio stations is even harder than finding new music.

I've been lucky to have moved a few times and discovered some great local radio stations along the way. They still make up the larger part of new music I discover. But I agree, mainstream stations are very unlikely to do this for you, and there's currently no good way to discover good radio stations.

If you are in the UK, try BBC Radio 6 Music. Or if you have a VPN (I assume its not available from outside the the UK) https://www.bbc.co.uk/6music

it is available from outside the UK on the BBC website. alternatively, most (all?) of the BBC radio stream URLs can be found here [1], and consumed with e.g VLC

[1] https://gist.github.com/stengland/8705765

Similarly, in Canada we have CBC Radio 3 which plays pretty good indie music: https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-music-playlists/56-cbc-radio-3

There are other CBC Music playlists that are surprisingly good too: https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-music-playlists

Web radios have been a thing for like, what, 30 years? I can't believe there is not a single web radio playing the music you like.

What kind of music are you looking for?

I find FIP to have a pretty decent selection of music (clearly not top 40 only). https://www.fip.fr/

I've discovered so many great artists through FIP, the greatest thing about this one is the themed channels, you're almost guaranteed to always find something good to listen to.

> Maybe if you live in LA or NYC there are some other stations with more eclectic selections

Do you know that you can get radio stations over the Internet? It doesn’t matter where you physically live.

And it's much more interested to hear station from locations you never been :)

Recommend to try https://www.radio-browser.info

public / college/ indie stations. They usually have online streaming. For all the digging I've done online, radio yields the most unexpected, unheard results. Not always what you want, but still, interesting. Irreplaceable.

stream them!

My favorite "unexpected surprises" station is BBC "6 Music", which might be called "Radio 6 Music" depending on what you use to listen to it. It's streamable worldwide.

I might be a bit biased since I grew up in the UK, but I recommend it highly. And like all BBC radio, no ads!

+1 to KEXP and KCRW (and KCRW's Eclectic 24). KEXP plays a ton of great music of different varieties of music, some of which, I wouldn't normally listen to.

I only recently discovered KEXP...strangely enough through a random youtube video of a live performance from Austra.

I've also had some success with BBC Radio 1 in the past.

Radio can be a good source but I still feel music recommendations is something that's gonna be cracked by algos in the future

Tycho also did a really great performance on KEXP a few years ago: https://youtu.be/c_56qQqxvm4

Absolutely! Radio for me has always been the primary way I discover new music, whether that's back in the day listening to John Peel or Patrick Forge, or nowadays lots of WFMU.org (a decades old New Jersey free-form station) and NTS radio.

I do listen to algorithmic radio sometimes, if I'm in the mood for something specific, but it doesn't feel the same as having a live DJ playing records.

Agreed. I love The Current. When they play a song I don't like I switch to something else whether it is kexp or another genre. (Sadly, one of my favorite hip hop stations beatbasement seems to have gone away. I still haven't found a good replacement for underground hip hop. Gtronic radio is good but not to the same level as beatbasement).

Definitely radio, and I love that the music I hear had been choose by someone, not only an algorithm that knows exactly the songs that will appeal to me. May I ask you what the great radios from Athens (GR) are ?

Also, if you can listen to web radio, give a try to the french station FIP (https://www.fip.fr/) they are actually on strike so it's not as good as usually but it's definitely one of the best music radio out there. Hope you enjoy !

In the Bay Area KFJC (Foothills College/Los Altos) and KZSC (UC Santa Cruz) are also both quite good at playing music many listeners wouldnt otherwise discover. You can't get them in SF proper, but great for tuning in when you're down south a bit.

A lot of the college radio stations have HD2 streams which are really good, too:

XPN2: https://xpn.org/xpn-programs/xponential-radio

KCRW Eclectic 24: https://www.kcrw.com/music/shows/eclectic24

This has been exactly my experience. The best music i discovered was by friend’s recommendation. Coincidentally enough, a particual individual called Eleni showed me a lot of interesting prog rock bands over the years. She is also from Greece haha!

Came here to say the same thing. Human curated music podcasts (such as Bandcamp Weekly) are also a great way to discover music.

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