Federico had a nice post this week about how he keeps track of new music, which centers around the MusicHarbor app for iOS. Discovering new music is something I’ve really struggled with since music blogs largely went away. The streaming services simply are not optimizing for new music discovery, especially not the way I would like. While the tool is focused on Apple Music and has an integration with the service, I simply search for the releases in Spotify, which is my current streaming service of choice.
Tag: discovery
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Secrets To Finding Good Stuff
Over the past week or so I have had no less than a dozen people ask me the same question, “how do you find out about stuff?” One of the things that I preach to my staff at Topspin is to never answer a question for one person. Chances are if someone asks you a question, there are others who probably want to know the answer as well. Now it’s time for me to take my own advice.
The short answer is, I don’t find good stuff. I follow other people that find good stuff.
The important thing is that the good stuff is almost always pushed to me, which means I don’t spend nearly as much time as other people pulling the stuff. It’s an important distinction and it allows me to be on top of good stuff without a lot of effort. I could be a lot better about sharing stuff and I’ve recently employed Buffer to help with that.
Here’s how I do it:
- I get daily emails that pull popular links from people I follow via Curate.me or News.me.
- I subscribe to Dave Pell’s amazing Next Draft newsletter.
- I subscribe to Kale Davis’ amazing Hacker Newsletter.
- I subscribe to the Longreads weekly newsletter.
- I use the browse feature on Instapaper.
- I subscribe to a lot of RSS feeds via Google Reader, though I never actually use Google Reader. I use the excellent Reeder app on my Mac and iOS devices. Worth the small price. Here’s a direct download to my OPML file, which you can import into your own Google Reader account.
Follow smart people on Twitter and Tumblr. Follow the tastemakers and smartest people in your industry in both applications and check out the people that they follow. Services like Curate.me and News.me will work a lot better and help you cut through the noise.
Finally, make sure you’re not just pulling all the time. Push to your networks as well and let people know about the awesome stuff you find. Chances are you have an audience that knows less than you do and wants to know more.
How do you find good stuff?
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exfm blog: Relative Pitch: 920
exfm blog: Relative Pitch: 920
While I haven’t discovered (at least that I have kept track of) the same number of songs, 2011 proved to be an incredible year for music discovery. Tumblr, exfm and Soundcloud have been central to that. It just needs to be easier to keep track of in 2012.
In a typical year I discover a few dozen new songs. In 2011 that number is currently sitting at 920. I still have two weeks to go.
It’s been a very good year for music discovery.
Previous years most likely offered as much or nearly as much music to be found. Except I never really had a…
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Orpheus Media Research Consumer Survey Reveals that Music Recommendation Tools are Opening… — NEW YORK, March 23, 2011 /PRNewswire/ —
- 57 percent of the respondents indicated that they most often relied on radio or word of mouth to learn about new music; 14 percent indicated that they relied on mainstream media
- 59 percent identify music as playing a key role in their social life
- 40 percent are interested in finding new ways to discover new music
- 40 percent have more than 1,000 songs (tracks) in their personal music library
- 44 percent listen to music at work
- 82 percent identified radio as the greatest single influence of their music listening
- 82 percent feel that the music industry is doing an average to poor job in their ability to identify good music
- 44 percent rate their friends as good or excellent at identifying good music