I have pretty much the same setup. The only thing that bothers me with navidrome+feishin is that gapless playback is not working perfectly.

Also, a great resource for discovering new music is the public library. They often have a curated CD section that I then rip into FLAC. I've had great chats with the people in my town's library, and I often pick a totally random CD off the shelves and discover some amazing artists.

Regarding Bandcamp, I find following small labels to be a great way to find new music. Small labels tend to release music of similar style and quality. They often also have deals on bandcamp where you can buy an entire label's discography for crazy cheap, like a hundred or so albums for $50!

Mostly I listen to web radios, not always in a language that I master (hello Japanese). And Shazam plus Spotify is still a killing combo, for me.

While moving from spotify to youtube music a few years ago I bought a vinyl player to listen to full albums and fell for it. Then when I moved to curate and self host my collection with Plex and Plexamp I realized I'm not using the player anymore since I'm using Plexamp to listen to albums. Plexamp is not perfect and not open source unfortunately, but it's a really good non-enshitified product.

I had to migrate away from youtube music since the experience was infuriating me every time. I love making playlists on the go. In youtube music after adding 30 tracks to the play queue, tapping 1 track accidentally deletes the play queue and plays this track. This made me feel bad every time it happened.

I don't see how it is just accepted to lose progress in 2026 as if we're using win95. It feels like 80% of the sw I use provides a caveman UX, not leveraging the tech, leaking implementation details and being constrained by technical reasons. On the other hand, working on Prepbook[0], I realized how hard it is to create the perfect experience and how it's even harder to justify it financially.

I'm doing discovery by talking to people, I love it. Every time I listen to Monolink I recall my co worker that just said "check out monolink" when he heard I love Ott. I love that it makes the experience about connection to people as well.

[0] https://prepbook.app

Epic bought bandcamp many moons ago. Did they enshittify it or is it still going strong?

I stopped listening to Pandora well over a decade ago because its algorithm eventually decided that I only liked 12 songs in the whole world.

This radio station is local to the city I live in, and they've been great for music discovery for me, although heavy focus on local artists, but they've put me onto a few international artists as well.

https://threedradio.com/

I subscribe to them, have done so for ~10 years I reckon. I don't listen as much as I used to, but I want them to continue existing either way.

Be aware, the quality of their playlists is incredibly variable, but that's part of the charm. I guarantee you'll hear something you haven't heard before... for better or worse.

Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zHR0HMFY60 (with 2 minutes of silence at the start to, presumably, avoid auto-copyright claims).

Public radio is great, NPR and the member stations have some great streaming channels. KEXP and KCRW are two favs

I believe there are! I consistently hear good things about KEXP and FIP but I haven’t listened to either extensively.

I listen to a lot of SomaFM (free, https://somafm.com/) and the Flow State radio-podcast (paid, https://www.flowstate.fm/).

RRR and PBS in Melbourne both stream online and are both fantastic for music discovery. Go the former if you lean indie and the latter if you lean international.

Internet radio is still going strong: https://www.radio-browser.info/

In addition to those two bangers, BBC6 and RNE also have shows to discover new musics. PS: RadioParadise is also a safe place for good music.

I used to use hypem soo much during the music blog days and had a subscription etc but it seemed to stop working or something so after a while I stopped using it. I will have to check it out again

nts is all fire until a dj plays mp3 bitcrunched track that just hurts your ears

I've discovered so many great artists through Spotify, and been to many of their shows (which Spotify also helps surface with their "Live Events" feature). I regularly get artists with less than 100k listeners in my Discover Weekly, which I then look up, and find that they did a concert on KEXP, and the comments all proclaiming "I knew good music wasn't dead!".

So I can say for sure that I don't share the slop sentiment. Sure, there's some generic filler every now and then, but any non-cohesive mix, as opposed to a carefully curated album is going to have songs that naturally become "fillers".

Just now, I discovered that Spotify snuck in "The Juan Maclean - Running Back To You (2014)", which is a cover of "Brian Bennet - Solstice (1978)". Neither songs are completely unknown, but they're also not exactly Bruno Mars.

I don't know if this is pure luck or algorithmic rhythm analysis, but for me it's working.