I use the Music-Map for my "music journey". Every other day, I start from an artist I already like and travel through the names until I stumble into an area I have not been to before:
HypeMachine tracks the music being written about across thousands of blogs and still works for me as a great discovery / serendipity engine.
Tracks link to artists on Bandcamp, SoundCloud, Spotify, the write-up that got them picked up by HypeM, and any work from the artist previously covered.
I usually listen by genre and pick those per the kind of work I’m doing. There are many genres. 98% of what I hear is new to me. I favorite and skip tracks and open especially tasty ones in new tabs for deeper-dives.
It’s always a pleasure to go back to my feed of favorites every few weeks. I revisit tracks i took time to explicitly like and have long uninterrupted sets to enjoy. This is usually when I do deeper dives and buy stuff on SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Looking at the map for Quiet Company yields a list of names that are mostly foreign to me that I'll be plowing through as I work.
Surprisingly, Youtube Music has pretty decent music discovery in the form of it's radio feature, sort of like Grooveshark.
I wish they would combine Google Music's functionality and organization with Youtube Music's discover-ability and expanded library.
This seems to be powered by http://www.gnoosic.com/, is this the only source of data?
;)
I'm starting to feel that depending on users to provide explicit lists misses a lot of interesting data, unfortunately.
Putting in a few unpopular artists that I like came up with a lot of related bands that I already know and like, plus double that number that I now need to add to my ever-growing music to-do list.