Finding music I actually like feels harder than it should be. Spotify, Google Music, and even Bandcamp’s recommendation engines throw stuff at me that only vaguely resembles what I’m into—like they caught the genre but completely missed the tone, production, or intent. I’ve tried following curated playlists, newsletters, and blogs, but most of them just dump dozens of new releases at me every week if not hundreds. It’s overwhelming, and honestly, I end up ignoring most of it. There’s too much content and not enough actual filtering for taste.

I like music that sits off-center—black metal, experimental, avant-garde, but mostly anything that makes me ask “What the fuck did I just listen to?” Most platforms seem confused by that. The moment my listening habits step outside the predictable paths, the recommendations become nonsense. These services don’t know what to do with nuance, and they definitely don’t understand context.

The two places that come closest to being useful are Bandcamp and the Metal Archives. But it’s still a lot of work to sift through a lot of crap. It’s better crap, but still too much to process.

At this point, I’ve accepted that finding music I love is going to be a manual process. There’s no one app or feed that’s going to solve it for me. Instead, I follow fans whose taste sometimes matches my own but it all still feels like I’m fighting through the noise to find something worth listening to a second time.

How do you all find your music? Do you like a broader range of music than me or I am the only one here?

I’m playing around with the idea of sharing reviews of albums I’ve come across and really disliked – counter to what most people are doing, but I don’t want to come off as hateful to these bands that I’m sure have followings. I’m not a gatekeeper to musical taste, but I think doing reviews of things I don’t like could be entertaining – So keep an eye out for that.