Let’s get this out of the way: There’s no right or wrong way to appreciate music, good taste doesn’t necessarily make you a superior person, and Sabrina Carpenter can hit just as hard as a SoundCloud account with 1,137 followers expelling abrasive experiments.
But it’s undeniable that some of the main channels people use to discover music are destroying the culture. Spotify has irrevocably devalued music and locked people in for keeps while its CEO now slings money at defense contractors like a kid throwing money at Pokémon cards.
Bands like Xiu Xiu, Deerhoof, and King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard have already pulled their music from the platform, with more surely to come.
For many people, Spotify is the limit to their musical foraging—but there’s so much more you can do.
As AI pollutes social media and algorithms silo people into tidy bubbles, listeners will need to deploy canny tricks to escape the force-feed apparatus.
Here are some methods for scraping good music from the data wasteland, organized in a hierarchy from bottom-feeder basics to more sophisticated and ultimately, uhh, harebrained strategies.
