how do you find this stuff?
I was sharing a LEMON BOY song on a Discord server the other day and a pal asked me, "how do you find this stuff?" which . . . fair question, actually! Despite the proliferation of music streaming services1, in the year of our Luigi two thousand twenty six, finding cool and interesting new music is a nontrivial task. It's not hard, but you gotta put in the effort and you gotta know where to look. So here's how I find this stuff,2 no algorithms required. Friends don't let friends use Spotify.
Live Music
You don't actually have to go to any shows to find new bands this way--all you need is a band you like, or, in a pinch, a poster that catches your eye. 3 Go to their social media (regrettably, the standard social media for bands is Instagram) and click around until you find them talking about a show that's coming up, or a show that they've played recently, and then check out the bands they played with. If you're really stuck, pick a venue somewhere and just check out their calendar until you find a band whose name you like and see where that gets you.
If the bands you like don't play live anymore (and haven't done for long enough that you can't find old shows on their social media), you've got some options. setlist.fm is meant to document old setlists but it will also tell you who else played at that venue on that night. It's an incomplete resource but you might find something cool if you take some time to dig. But if that doesn't work--if nothing else it will struggle to find something new, if that's what you're looking for--just keep reading.
Live Studio Performances
KEXP is a noncommercial radio station (and honestly a much shorter version of this post would read "listen to KEXP" and contain no other text) and their Youtube channel regularly uploads live studio performances of cool bands from all over the world, in a wide variety of genres. Spend an hour or two watching things on KEXP and you will almost certainly find a band to fall in love with.
And KEXP's Youtube is far from the only channel doing this. Seattle's alt-weekly newspaper, The Stranger, just started a fortnightly podcast on their Youtube showcasing cool local music (you should watch IROIRO's performance while you're there); Audiotree does a pretty similar thing to KEXP. There's almost certainly others.
Explore Connections
When I first started really actively looking for new music as a young ghost in the desert, I started by looking for connections to bands I liked4. Musicians often have other projects (either side projects or bands they were in before) and they will often collaborate with their friends and fellow musicians; it can be as easy as doing a web search for the name of one of the band members to see if anything interesting comes up. (I was helped immensely in my early searches by hanging out on fan forums, but I am pretty sure those don't exist anymore.)
Sometimes the search won't find anything, of course, but I've always really liked finding the connections that go beyond sharing a stage. For me art is about connection and communication, and finding these little collaborations really helps to bring it alive.
Get Recommendations
At the risk of stating the obvious, a good way to find new music is to get recommendations. I have found a few bands by just reading music reviews--generally I'd focus on reviews that make the music sound like something you'll be interested in rather than high number ratings (but really I'm not fond of music reviews as more than an incidental source)--but I am mainly talking about asking friends here.
You probably have a friend who is into finding new music and I promise you they will be excited to share with you if you ask5 (or your money back!); there is very little that is more satisfying than sharing music with someone. You don't need to know about genre or anything. If you hang out on a Discord server with a music share channel (and given that you're reading an obscure blog on the indie web I'm pretty sure you do), check some of those out.
For me, the main thing in finding new music is to be intentional: I am seeking, not merely putting music on as background noise and going to do something else. It's not that I've never found music because an algorithm thought I'd like it, but I have never found music when I wasn't looking for it.
There's so much out there. To paraphrase noted cool person GlitchCat7, it's like looking for bugs: you just have to poke at some logs and you'll find some. Eventually you'll learn which logs are most likely to hold the kinds of bugs you think are interesting, but the main thing is you gotta poke.
So get out there and start poking. Be deliberate; explore serendipity. You're not going to like everything you hear6, but if you keep looking you'll find something you love. When you do--when you find a song that hits just right--don't just stop there. Look into them. See who they like, who they've played with, what else they've made. Keep digging. There is so much music out there; look around and you'll find something for you.
And then go buy their shit--ideally on Bandcamp Friday, the day on which Bandcamp waives their usual fee and gives 100% of your payment to the artists, the next of which is August 7th--and leave them a message that says you think they're cool. Streaming services (even the ones that are trying to be ethical about it) don't pay very much. Ten bucks and some words of encouragement goes a lot further than you'd think.
Or, one could argue, because of.↩
I probably don't need to clarify it but I feel like I should: this is what works for me; music is personal and different people approach things differently.↩
This is how I found The Rat Utopia Experiment and Daughters of Venus; there was a benefit show that was on my birthday and I thought that sounded like a good way to spend an evening.↩
Which mainly meant, in practice, looking for connections to Harvey Danger. Sean Nelson did some backing vocals for obscure indie acts such as Death Cab for Cutie and The Decemberists, so I checked them out; during their hiatus he performed with The Long Winters; their original drummer, Evan Sult, left the band and joined Bound Stems during that same hiatus; he then moved to St. Louis and started Sleepy Kitty.↩
If nothing else, even if you don't know me, track me down on Bluesky and I will happily give you some recommendations.↩
But also consider that thing I vaguely remember St. Vincent saying in an interview once: that her favorite songs were always the ones she didn't like at first.↩