Finding New Music

2026-05-23

I never relied on Spotify or other dedicated music streaming services for my daily music listening needs. Local MP3s and NewPipe give me all I need - which is a lot. If you don't know NewPipe yet and you use an Android smartphone, you should immediately install it and never use the official YouTube again. It is amazing in itself and is also a great way of showing people why they might want F-Droid as an alternative app store. While NewPipe still relies on platforms like YouTube, Bandcamp and Soundcloud, it's adversarial interoperability shields me from some of their more obvious ills - mostly ads and recommendation algorithms. Adversarial interoperability is the strategy of building free software which can use the resources of closed, proprietary platforms on it's own terms. Like LibreOffice being able to open and edit MS Word Documents - or like NewPipe using YouTube's sharing and embedding functions in ways that make it possible to watch or listen to the streams without being screamed at by ads and recommendations for some Fascist's videos. But sometimes I miss those recommendations. YouTube's autoplay led me to some great finds while listening to music via the browser, and a friend of mine recently told me about how mainly relying on NewPipe for music led to her listening to mostly the same music as she did 15 years ago.

In "The Digital Condition" Felix Stalder wrote about sorting and algorithmisation as a necessary collective cultural technique to create collective meaning within digital environments. This stands true regardless of which specific ways we implement to handle the sheer mass of information we are confronted with. Todays dominant ways of interacting with the huge cultural libraries of all the music on the internet are dictated by the algorithms of digital capitalism's platform corporations. And they are not built in our interests, but in theirs: It is about control, datafication and capital accumulation, not about discovering new art and creating meaning for ourselves. Avoiding those systems is a matter of self defense.

Radio Rescue

So I stood before the problem that I wanted to discover new music, but did not want to get it via the corporate recommenders most people use. And the solution came in form of my roommate who tuned our kitchen radio to byte.fm - a radio station transmitting via analog waves over Hamburg and Berlin and streaming on the web. It's donation-funded, ad-free radio by music nerds with many specialised formats. Most of the hosts talk is in German, some in English. Their wide range of excellent music already added a lot of gems to my daily music playlists. And if you support them, you get access to their system of marking and managing songs you liked and to their whole archive. It's great. I found so much interesting music completely new to me, both freshly released or old. I learned about culture and music history from their special interest shows. And it works great for both having it running in the background while cooking and for very active listening.

Lately I also started exploring soma fm, which consists of a bunch of specialised online streams. There is one for progressive house/trance, another one for indie pop and even one for making you feel like you are in a 70s secret agent movie. It is also community financed and there is a lot more to discover yet.

I write about digital sociality as a commonly produced resource a lot, but mostly elsewhere, and there is an old Fediverse post of mine I want to expand into a blog post on that topic. There is a lot to be said about consensual collective social systems for discoverability and recommendation, about different ways to build the new cultural techniques of solidarity on the digital infrastructures we have today. But for the specific problem of discovering new music to both keep up to date and widen my cultural horizon, one solution working for me was already flying through the aether around me.